Retired Army officer Ralph Peters' column in Frontpage Mag yesterday takes a hard look at where we're going wrong in the GWoT.
Have we lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory?
It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness. Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies.
They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills.
Obsessed with low-level "tactical" morality - war's inevitable mistakes - the officers in question have lost sight of the strategic morality of winning. Our Army and Marine Corps are about to suffer the imposition of a new counterinsurgency doctrine designed for fairy-tale conflicts and utterly inappropriate for the religion-fueled, ethnicity-driven hyper-violence of our time.
We're back to struggling to win hearts and minds that can't be won.
Peters is right. There is nothing we can do to make the "Arab street" love us, but we can make them respect us. This is done by winning the war. And to do that, we need to start fighting like we want to win. If we lose, then it won't matter how civilized we were while we were doing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment