U.S. military experts as the Un-Dead

Since around June 2006, war maven Ralph Peters has been bemoaning the Iraq fiasco and saying in increasingly desperate ways that only real war can save the situation. But for years prior to the birth of his current pessimism, this same Peters thought / imagined / fantasized that we were waging a real war, and, furthermore, that we were on the verge of winning that war, even as I, a nobody with a blog, kept pointing out that we were not waging a real war and had no strategy by which even theoretically we could defeat the insurgency.

Thus in November 2004, Peters announced that the imminent victory in Fallujah would mean U.S. victory over the insurgency itself and the birth of a new Iraqi nation. I—knowing nothing, nada, zilch about military affairs—said that this was horsefeathers, because simple logic indicated that the insurgents would simply leave Fallujah and fight elsewhere.

And indeed, two days later, as discussed at VFR, Peters in a follow-up column amended his previous announcement of imminent final victory and said that success in Fallujah would only be “a” victory (Wow—from final victory over the insurgency to “a” victory in 48 hours!) and that the terrorist campaign and bombings would continue.

Yet despite the fact that I, a non-expert, had just shown how false and misleading and evanescent had been the triumphalist pronouncements of the expert, a VFR commenter named Tyrone Washington scolded me as follows:

Obviously we should review strategy, but we should also defer to those who have spent their whole lives studying war and warfare. We’re just citizens with a highly diminished view of events. There has to be some concept of authority and loyalty. That is, we need to learn when to trust our leaders and not diminish the war effort by too frequent and unfair criticism.

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N. writes:

Your correspondent in 2004 chided you for not deferring to “those who have spent their whole lives studying war and warfare,” but it is not obvious Peters has really learned all that much from his study. Peters is a newspaper column writer with some knowledge of military affairs, not necessarily a scholar of strategy. [LA replies: Peters is not just a columnist; prior to the beginning of his New York Post column in spring 2003 he had authored several books on military affairs.] The VFW hall is full of military vets who know something about war, too, but I doubt that anyone at the NY Post is going “round to ask the Vets of foreign Wars their opinion on Fallujah or anything else.

This is still America, where citizen-soldiers serve the civilian leadership, not Prussia. I urge you and everyone else to read such works as Sun Tzu’s “on War” and “Liddell Hart’s “The Indirect Approach.” One of the axioms of Sun Tzu is paraphrased as “Know yourself and know the enemy, never be in doubt. Know yourself and not the enemy, you are in danger. Do not know yourself or your enemy, you will be defeated.” Peters’s problem is he doesn’t know the enemy, and appears actively not to want to know the enemy. He’s not the only one, either.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 15, 2007 01:47 PM | Send