Terror's appetite is only whetted by weakness.

[patteeu]

By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 27, 2004 -- SOLDIERS don't beg. But an old friend of mine who's still in uniform came close the other day. He badly wanted me to write another column before Election Day stressing that our troops are winning in Iraq.
He's an Army veteran of three wars. Now he's working to help Iraq become a democratic model for the Middle East. And he's worried.

Not about terrorists or insurgents. He's afraid John Kerry will be elected president.

"Kerry's rhetoric is giving the bad guys a thread to hang on," he wrote. "They're hoping we lose our nerve. They're more concerned with the U.S. elections than with the Iraqi ones."

My pal has been involved in every phase of our Iraq operations — dating back to Desert Storm. And he's convinced that the terrorists have risked everything to create as much carnage as they can before Nov. 2. Our troops are killing them left and right. The terrorists are desperate. They can't sustain this tempo of attacks much longer.

But Sen. Kerry insists that we're losing — giving our enemies hope that we'll pull out. No matter what else John Kerry may say, the terrorists only hear his criticisms of our president and our war.

Let's review what's actually happening in Iraq.

The terrorist stronghold of Fallujah is increasingly isolated. Night after night, precision weapons and raids by special-operations forces kill international terrorist leaders. Terrified, the local troublemakers are trying to play the negotiations card. They know the U.S. Marines are coming back. And this time the Leathernecks won't be stopped short. Allah's butchers are praying that they can bring down our president before terror's citadel falls.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people have been revolted by the terrorists' barbarities. They may not want U.S. troops in their streets forever, but they do not want to be ruled by fanatical murderers. Kidnapping aid workers and lopping off heads on videotape horrifies decent Muslims. The slaughter of 50 unarmed Iraqi recruits did not win hearts and minds.

Every day, Iraqis are more engaged in defending their own country. Elections are still on track. The suicide bombings continue, but they haven't deterred Iraq's new government. Nor have they been able to stop the Coalition and Iraq's expanding forces from cleaning out one terrorist rat's nest after another.



Muqtada al-Sadr is quiet as a mouse. Najaf is being rebuilt. Two-thirds of Iraq's provinces are quiet. We never see any headlines about our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq — because they're building a successful modern society in the Middle East. Good-news stories aren't welcome in our undeniably pro-Democratic media.

Even the French are uncharacteristically subdued. The serpents of the Seine thought they'd seduced the terrorists with a few anti-American apples. Instead, they've found that they can't even free two kidnapped French journalists.

After their own recent terrorist debacle, the Russians repented their criticism of the Bush administration. The Spanish, too, discovered that appeasement doesn't work any better for them than for the French — an Islamist plot to blow up justice-ministry buildings was recently uncovered. And there's more to come.

Terror's appetite is only whetted by weakness.

Of course, the United Nations is still doing everything it can to undercut President Bush. Embarrassed by Oil-for-Food corruption revelations, the U.N. would like to get back to the good old days of the Clinton administration, which winked at outright U.N. criminality.

The terrorists are pulling out all the stops to shed blood in Iraq this week. While the media makes every mortar round sound like the end of the world, the encouraging news is that the terrorists haven't been able to do more. They can harass convoys and murder civilians — but they haven't budged our troops or the new Iraqi government.

Of course, the terrorists aren't suddenly going to quit if President Bush wins at the polls — but his re-election would be a terrible psychological blow to them. They know how high the stakes are in Iraq.

The struggle isn't just about the fate of one country, but about the future of the entire Middle East. If freedom and the rule of law get even a 51 percent victory in Iraq, it's the beginning of the end for the terrorists and the vicious regimes that bred them.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rapidly using up the human capital they've accumulated over decades. The casualties in Iraq are overwhelmingly on the terrorist side. Extremist leaders have paid a particularly heavy price. But they won't stop fighting because they can't. The terrorists have to win in Iraq. They have to defeat America.

The astonishing thing is that so many of our fellow Americans don't get it. The terrorists aren't committing their shrinking reserves because the outcome's a trivial matter. They recognize the magnitude of what we're helping the Iraqi people achieve.

This is the big one. The fate of a civilization hangs in the balance. And all we hear from one presidential contender is that it's the "wrong war, at the wrong time."

It is. For the terrorists.



http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/o...nists/31117.htm

[Captain_Poncho]

Excellent article.

[Rohirrim]

Wrong again. Thank you for playing. Islamic fundamentalists rely on a myth called "a culture of death." They don't really care who gets elected in the U.S., although their websites want Bush to win. They don't care about our freedoms either. They are a reactionary, fundamentalist cult that wants to somehow re-establish Islamic supremacy in the Middle East, the way it was 900 years ago.

Just as one can see with the demise of the KKK or the Nazi movement, when the economics go up, the fundamentalists go down.

[Mile High Shack]

you honestly think it's not a ploy by the islamic fundamentalistic groups to support GW? ever hear of reverse psychology?

[Blueflame]

New York Post, eh? Wonder how that Kerry/Gephardt ticket is gonna do next Tuesday?

[bendog]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-fallouja24oct24,0,6798878.story?coll=la-iraq-complete

[patteeu]

New York Post, eh? Wonder how that Kerry/Gephardt ticket is gonna do next Tuesday?

Hmmm. I'm not sure what the fact that this came from the NY Post has to do with anything. This is an editorial. The bias and credibility of their news operation has nothing to do with it. Ralph Peters is not a reporter, he's a retired US Army intelligence officer who has written several books and articles on military strategy as well as a novel or two.

Prior to retiring from the Army, he wrote for the US Army War College publication "Parameters" from which I got this bio (from 1996):

Major Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for evaluating emerging threats. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, and Turkey, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has published five books and dozens of articles and essays on military and international concerns. This is his sixth article for Parameters.

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/96spring/peters.htm

[patteeu]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-fallouja24oct24,0,6798878.story?coll=la-iraq-complete

My goodness, Bendog. That's one heck of a long article. It looks interesting, but it might take me a while to get through it. Is it relevant to the Peters article or is it a response to the title of the thread?

[bendog]

Yet the op ed piece makes no mention of bush's blunders in fallouja, which makes me doubt its credibility/bias if not outright veracity.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_showdown_ahead

[patteeu]

Yet the op ed piece makes no mention of bush's blunders in fallouja, which makes me doubt its credibility/bias if not outright veracity.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_showdown_ahead

I honestly don't follow your logic here. The point of the article is that there are some good indications in Iraq to go along with the negatives that have been well publicized (if not overblown) by the mainstream media. Fallujah doesn't fit that description.

FWIW, Peters has written plenty about Fallujah since rioters mutilated the bodies of 4 Americans there last year (and he agrees that Bush blundered there).

Here is one example of his thoughts on the subject:

KILL FASTER! New York Post RALPH PETERS

May 20, 2004 -- IN Iraq last month, I learned a great deal about the future of combat. By watching TV. During the initial fighting in Fallujah, I tuned in al-Jazeera and the BBC. At the same time, I was getting insider reports from the battlefield, from a U.S. military source on the scene and through Kurdish intelligence. I saw two different battles.

The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.

During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.

It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.

The Marines in Fallujah weren't beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. By lies.

Get used to it.

This is the new reality of combat. Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops will have to go in the future. And we can't change it. So we had better roll up our camouflage sleeves and deal with it.

The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.

That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.

Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight.

With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up.

We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster now.

Even in Operation Desert Storm, the effect of images trumped reality and purpose. The exaggerated carnage of the "highway of death" north from Kuwait City led us to stop the war before we had sufficiently punished the truly guilty — Saddam's Republican Guard and the regime's leadership. We're still paying for that mistake.

In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us — despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us.

The global media disrupted the U.S. and Coalition chains of command. Foreign media reporting even sparked bureaucratic infighting within our own government.

The result was a disintegraton of our will — first from decisive commitment to worsening hestitation, then to a "compromise" that returned Sunni-Arab Ba'athist officers to power. That deal not only horrifed Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, it inspired expanded attacks by Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'a thugs hoping to rival the success of the Sunni-Arab murderers in Fallujah.

We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn't know what hit us.

The implication for tactical combat — war at the bayonet level — is clear: We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we're apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.

We have to speed the kill.

For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops.

We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.

Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them.

Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists.

To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.

Time is the new enemy.

Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides.

But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies.

The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us.

If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.

Retired Army officer Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad."

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=50294


Here is another from before the pull-out:

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/research_topics/research_topics_show.htm?doc_id=220619