{"id":29240,"date":"2012-03-23T00:35:39","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T04:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=29240"},"modified":"2012-03-23T00:36:29","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T04:36:29","slug":"ltc-ralph-peters-ret-unloads-on-the-generals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=29240","title":{"rendered":"LTC Ralph Peters (Ret) unloads on the Generals"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those not familiar with Ralph Peters he’s an old MI guy and unapologetic supporter of the war in Iraq who later came out in opposition to the surge, before conceding it worked. His record, as with most fallible humans, is mixed. He’s been know for inflammatory quotes such as: <\/p>\n

“Make no mistake: the anti-war voices long for us to lose any war they cannot prevent”<\/em><\/p>\n

and <\/p>\n

“We’ve mired ourselves by attempting to modernize a society that doesn’t want to be \u2014 and cannot be \u2014 transformed. We needed to smash our enemies and leave. Had it proved necessary, we could have returned later for another punitive mission. Instead, we fell into the great American fallacy of believing ourselves responsible for helping those who’ve harmed us.” <\/em><\/p>\n

He’s also had some rather choice assumptions<\/a> on potential POWs.<\/p>\n

In a piece titled “Soldiers Murder Afghans, Generals Murder Soldiers”<\/strong><\/a> Ralph Peters goes all out on the argument that the War in Afghanistan is irredeemable and has far exceeded its expiration date. He makes quite clear that our service members with stars on their shoulders carry much of the blame for this state of affairs.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a \u201cbattle cry\u201d in Afghanistan, it\u2019s \u201cBlame the troops!\u201d Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to \u201crespect Afghan culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

But generals don\u2019t have a clue about Afghan \u201cculture.\u201d They interact with well-educated, privileged, English-speaking Afghans who know exactly which American buttons to press to keep the tens of billions of dollars in annual aid flowing. The troops, on the other hand, daily encounter villagers who will not warn them about Taliban-planted booby traps or roadside bombs, who obviously want them to leave, who relish the abject squalor in which they live and who appear to value the lives of their animals above those of their women. When our Soldiers and Marines hear, yet again, that they need to \u201crespect Afghan culture,\u201d they must want to puke up their rations.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don\u2019t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it\u2019s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).<\/p>\n

What are our goals? What is our strategy? We\u2019re told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, ten years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk. Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets. We may not have a genius for war, but we sure do have a genius for kidding ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally I’d swap out much of the “Generals” with “politicians”.<\/p>\n

He also goes into the Robert Bales incident but that’s really just a foil for a bigger point he’s trying to make, be it right or wrong. Give it a read, it’s worth the 10 minutes of your life. I promise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those not familiar with Ralph Peters he’s an old MI guy and unapologetic supporter of … LTC Ralph Peters (Ret) unloads on the Generals<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":619,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-policy","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/619"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}