from Ralph Peters
BAGHDAD BLUES
RELEARNING THE ART OF WAR

New York Post online www.nypost.com

For two generations, we’ve trained military leaders to be statesmen in uniform, downplaying pugnacity and guts. We sent promising officers for Ivy League doctorates (thereby cutting off at least one of their . . . um . . . eggs), stressed political assignments, and inducted them into the Washington-insider cult of Salvation Through Negotiations.

Now we have bobble-head generals who nod along with the diplomats who want to hold their Versailles Conference before winning the war.

It’s past time for our senior leaders to jettison the political correctness and fight to win. But they honestly don’t know how anymore. They’ve been so thoroughly drugged with failed academic theories about counterinsurgency-with-lollipops that they’re more concerned with avoiding embarrassments than with killing the enemy.

The bitter truth is that, in the type of conflicts we now face, we must be willing to fight as ruthlessly and savagely as our opponents. We have to play by their moral rules. Stay-at-homes who never served will howl in indignation, but the alternative is defeat.

And is it ever more virtuous to lose to fanatics with apocalyptic visions than to win?

for the rest of Ralph’s commentary:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05112007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/baghdad_blues_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm?page=0

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