What's so interesting about this is this historic line has, until lately, been the mantra of the left. Peters digs in even deeper:
"The struggles in which we now are engaged, as well as the wars that will haunt our future, are bloody manifestations of a deformed world struggling to return to its natural condition."
That is, we in the US are doomed to fight much of what has been called the third world to sustain the "deformed" conditions -- "the damage" -- established by 500 years of European colonialism. So where does this put the United States? "By attempting to preserve a perverted European design for the world, we have placed ourselves on the wrong side of history."
A man like Peters, a regular on Fox News, gives the term "war-monger" new life. What he's done is take the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist arguments used for decades by the antiwar left, which have been denied and ridiculed by the right, and he has turned them on their head to use them as casus belli to justify more war in the name of imperial power. In other words, continue doing what you concede has been disastrous.
This kind of thinking, in my mind, makes the essential bankruptcy of the militarist right quite clear. All that's left for them is the fear of losing imperial power -- and, of course, their incredible military lethality. Oh yeh, and their bags of money. Nowhere does Peters even consider the obvious logical conclusion to what he's saying, which is, why continue to doom ourselves to sustaining the mess created by European colonialism and its tragic aftermath? Why not, albeit belatedly, re-evaluate our post-colonial mission in the world? Instead, Peters comes to a conclusion akin to that of Sterling Hayden as General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove:
"We have the capabilities to win any conflict on our own terms," Peters writes. "[B]ut our sheltered political class and the media and the academic circles to which it looks for reassurance lack the strength of character and will to fight for anything beyond personal advancement."
He forgot to mention saving our precious bodily fluids.
Just to round out Colonel Peters' nutty vision of the future, we need to understand that the media is the enemy. "The media's sense of entitlement-without-responsibility results in an establishment that doesn't report reality but willfully shapes it." Writers and video producers reporting and commenting on our wars has become so menacing, he writes, "we must regard the media as a whole as a combatant in our conflicts."
I realize as I'm writing this that he's talking about me.
From the sinister, he then moves to the absurd and becomes an international feminist. "Women's freedom," he writes, "is the defining social issue of our time." Yes, you heard that right. "The Islamists' horror at the prospect of equal rights for women is the most powerful underlying cause of the turmoil we face in the Muslim heartlands."
We have seen this anti-Muslim, pro-women's-liberation meme evolving out of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has never been articulated so clearly with such blood lust attached.
The international gender issue is obviously incredibly complex. In fact, for some time I've questioned whether our wars in Muslim countries have not exacerbated a reverse trend to feminism in our own ranks. For lack of a better term, we might call this a trend toward increased "masculinism." War naturally encourages a masculine identity. But on top of that, with our American soldiers and intelligence operatives engaging violently with extremist Muslim fighters on the battlefield for over a decade, does the inexorable rise of rape and other power-based forms of gender expression in our military suggest a seepage of intolerance for women into our own ranks. This would be pretty ironic, given all the hoopla about Zero Dark Thirty and women now being allowed into combat. The same may work for homosexuals in the military, since male rape is steadily rising as well.
If the right-wing fulminations of Ralph Peters are at all prescient, the future will be more of the same tragic, bloody blundering. More use of sophisticated lethal weaponry and more bags of money. Rudyard Kipling, of course, famously wrote the poem that heralded all that Peters reveals about the legacy of European colonialism for the United States. He wrote that it was the United States' duty to pick up "the white man's burden."
If democracy exists in this vast nation of ours as anything more than meaningless self-promotion, Americans of all classes, races and political affiliations face a major decision concerning the future. Either we belatedly face up to the legacy of European colonialism and its extension in US imperialism and learn the humility to help diplomatically forge a new, more just world order. Or we don't. In which case we'll live out Ralph Peters' nightmare.
I know which side I'm on.
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