Ralph Peters (retired military, columnist, occasional novelist, detested Clinton and admires Bush) waxes wroth in today's NY Post at the limp-wristed civilians who are impeding our Total Victory™ in Fallujah. From a soldier's standpoint Peters' arguments are understandable: if the foes (it pleases Ralph to call them "terrorists," which under Newspeak has come to mean anybody who shoots back at American forces) are given a respite they will likely employ it to "prepare their defenses, construct ambushes and organize a far tougher resistance than they could have presented two weeks ago." Dr. Peter prescribes an aggressive course of Shock and Awe:

Make no mistake: There can be no compromise in Fallujah. If we stop one inch short of knocking down the last door in the last house in the city, our enemies will be able to present the Battle of Fallujah to their sympathizers as a great victory: They fought the Americans to a stalemate (with the implication that, next time, the Americans will be defeated and driven from the Middle East).

Of course, we could defeat them. We know that. But in the broken world between the Bosporus and the Indus, seductive lies trump hard facts. Our insipid diplomacy plays into the hands of our enemies: It looks like cowardice. And it is.

We must not only win, we must be seen to win, graphically and decisively.

"Experts" warn that we mustn't alienate the hard-core Sunnis or the fundamentalist Shia's. Wake up and smell the cordite: They're already alienated. They'll never love us. So we'd better make damned sure they fear us.

The Battle of Fallujah isn't about one city. It's about the future of the entire Middle East. Despite the low number of casualties in historical terms, this could prove to be one of the decisive battles of history in its long-term effects.

We must win. If the enemy fights from mosques, level the mosques. If they fight from hospitals, gut the hospitals. If they open fire from orphanages, turn them into blackened shells. We cannot allow terrorists any sanctuaries. The men we face - and the watching world - interpret our decency as weakness.

[link|http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/23293.htm|http://www.nypost.co...umnists/23293.htm]

Again, it's difficult to fault the sense of this from the soldier's perspective. Of course, it also rather begs the question of our notional "decency." Much used to be made of the callousness of our Vietnamese enemies and their disregard of innocent lives. Let us imagine, for example, that during the Tet Offensive we had intercepted a communiqué from General Giap concerning the tactics to be employed in the battle for Hue: "If the enemy fights from churches, level the churches. If they fight from hospitals, gut the hospitals. If they open fire from orphanages, turn them into blackened shells." Would this not have been held up as proof of the bestial cruelty of the communist foe? Worshippers can flee a mosque, I daresay, but patients and staff may not be able to evacuate a hospital at need, and urchins on their chubby little pins might not be able to make it out of the orphanage before General Peters' terrible swift sword descends. It matters not. For the locals to resist our invasion and conquest of Iraq is ipso facto to commit a terrorist act, and against terrorism any countermeasures are permissible, and culpability for such "collateral damage" as may occur attaches entirely to the enemy and not at all to ourselves.

For a certain large segment of our population, that formulation will be enough (to paraphrase President Nixon, that droll man, if America does it, it's not an atrocity), and to the grunt on the ground in Iraq fifty flattened foundlings will understandably appear in the light of an acceptable tradeoff if the same artillery strike also takes out some oppo firepower. Others may wonder whether the casual ruthlessness of "Let a hundred orphans burn" really suits us as a governing philosophy. If we keep to the course of empire, we'll have ample opportunity to find out.

The LRPD as I type this post is: "Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!"

cordially,

Along these same lines, some bright blogger—I can't, alas, produce a citation—suggested recently, anent the manhandling of our immolated mercenaries last month, that perhaps the deposed president's "tough love" administrative practices, so deplored at the time on these shores, was necessary to keep his depraved and savage subjects in line, and that our best course now might be to apologize, dust him off and re-install him in the office he graced with such distinction for a quarter century, having first secured his promise not in future to invade his neighbors unless to further our strategic objectives, and only then with the personal permission of the Vice President or the Secretary of Defense.

A stretch, true, but a more plausible solution to this mess than President Chalabi.

cordially,

of Himmler's 1943 remarks at Poznan:

One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals. I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.. . . Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written.

Make the appropriate national substitutions, note the importance laid in each screed on "decency"...but of course, the contrast between Himmler's depraved indifference to the deaths of innocents and Ralph Peters' patriotic and lofty indifference to the deaths of innocents is absolute, and no loyal citizen of this brave New American Century would be tempted for a moment to suggest any points of correspondence.

cordially,