thedrifter
08-19-08, 07:02 AM
Looking For Trouble
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/19/2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in infantry and intelligence units before becoming a Foreign Area Officer and a global strategic scout for the Pentagon. He is the author of more than twenty books, which include Wars of Blood and Faith and Never Quit the Fight, as well as hundreds of columns for the New York Post, Armed Forces Journal, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and other publications. He is the author of the new book Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World.
FP: Ralph Peters, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Peters: Jamie, it's always an honor and a pleasure.
FP: Your new memoir describes many of the foreign adventures you experienced that shaped your views on future conflicts. What made you write this memoir now?
Peters: Well, I could say that I wanted to be right on time for the Georgia crisis, given that the book opens with my experiences in Georgia and the Caucasus on the eve of the Soviet collapse, but the straightforward answer is that you write a book when the book insists on being written.
For years, when my Army buddies and I would swap after-dinner stories by the fire (on the third bottle of wine), a point would come in the evening when one would say, "Man, you've got to write that down!" But I never did--I felt that writing anything that resembled a memoir would be an act of absurd vanity. Then, as the book's introduction explains, I found myself in a ratty hotel on the Turkish side of the Iraqi border in the middle of the night (waiting to be smuggled into Iraq by Kurds back in 2004), and the lightning bolt struck: In an instant, I felt compelled to write down the best tales of gallant friends and extraordinary times, of a few spooky moments and some downright absurd ones, in an unorthodox military career that took me from the dying Soviet Union and the "new" Russia, through Central Asia, Pakistan, Burma, Laos, Thailand, the Andean Ridge drug countries of Latin America--and, ultimately, our border with Mexico and even downtown L.A. That night, far from home, I felt the overwhelming need to capture my magnificent comrades on the page and to preserve those lost worlds--worlds eclipsed by September 11, 2001, yet which led directly to it.
In the end, this is a book of enjoyable stories--some laugh-out-loud funny. But it's also a deadly serious picture, from the mud, blood and dust level, of how we got to where we are today.
FP: The book provides a street-level account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the often-ugly birth of the post-Soviet world. Can you talk a bit about the devastation caused by Communism and socialist policies?
Peters: My first direct experience with the monstrosity of socialism came in 1972, in the former Yugoslavia. I was an undergraduate off to see the world for the summer. And, as described in the book, my first whiff of Belgrade taught me the indelible lesson that the problem with dialectical materialism is that the dialectic never delivers the material. All of my later experiences with the malignant, vicious Soviet empire only reinforced that first impression drawn from Tito's communism-lite.
Bad form to quote oneself, but there's a line in the book that states that the tombstone of the unknown Soviet citizen would read "Died of neglect." We didn't beat the Soviets with bombers and missiles. We beat them with supermarkets, with free markets--and personal freedom.
I saw, first-hand, the human tragedies, the wastage, the casual cruelty of the Soviet system toward its citizen-prisoners. The first part of the book tries to tell their stories--of decent human beings trapped hopelessly in a world of Lenin-meets-Kafka. The only good thing about communism and socialism was the stirring rhetoric. But that rhetoric was completely empty--and perverted by the cynics who always seized power after killing the idealists:
No idealist survives very long in any system constructed on the basis of an abstract, intellectual ideology. My experiences with the Soviet empire, in all its forms, burned a lifelong hatred of all ideologies into me--and we must always remember that one of our blessings in the USA is that we're not ideologues, but pragmatists--we're all "from Missouri." Democracy is not an ideology--it's a technique for political organization that uses elections as a tool. Today, we Americans are at our worst (and most European) when we subscribe to any formal ideology.
FP: Tell us about the military officers who had vital knowledge who were dismissed by Washington during the Clinton years. What were the consequences?
Peters: It was heartbreaking. My close circle of comrades and I--all Russian speakers and adventurers by nature--would dive into the guts of the Soviet Union (often at our own expense, by the way--there was always money to buy new billion-dollar satellites, but no money for officers like us to crawl over the Soviet sickbed and discover things no satellite can see). We'd come back with first-hand accounts of the developing ethnic strife, of the corruption, of the KGB/FSB's machinations, even with battlefield reports we risked our lives to gather--and back in Washington we were just blown off (not by the Army, but by the CIA, the other intel agencies and the administration).
If the intelligence didn't benefit Boeing or Lockheed Martin and cost billions, it was written off as worthless. There was zero value placed on human intelligence--it was surreal. I'd come back from Country X with an eyewitness account and some twenty-something Clintonista who'd never been farther from the USA than Cancun would tell me that I didn't know what I was talking about. And the State Department, with its pathetic apparatchiks, was the worst of all--as the book recounts, I once returned to our embassy in Armenia with a first-hand account of fighting where there wasn't supposed to be any--and our diplomat on duty, who was cowering in the embassy, terrified of leaving the Yerevan city limits, essentially called me a liar. My views just didn't match the Clinton administration’s, and State actually trusted the reports from the Armenian government over the word of a U.S. Army officer.
FP: Pakistan is at the center of our conflict. When was it already clear that we were headed for big problems in terms of Pakistan and when did Washington know it?
Peters: When I went to Pakistan to work with its military in 1994/1995, the problems were already looming. Charlie Wilson's War may be exaggerated for dramatic effect, but it's essentially correct that, once the Russians abandoned Afghanistan, we washed our hands of a region flooded with arms and Islamist extremists we'd given steroid shots. The Pakistani generals desperately wanted our help in dealing with Islamist extremism--but, once again, the Clinton regime wasn't interested. All the Clintons cared about was their beloved Benazir Bhutto, who spoke lovely English and talked democracy--while she used Saudi funding to pursue nuclear weapons. Benazir Bhutto was a vicious witch who, helped by her criminal husband (now in power, thanks) looted Pakistan--when she was assassinated I refused to mourn her. She despised and exploited her own people, and the Clintons just thought she was Betsy Ross in a Ferragamo scarf. There were countless other mistakes made vis-à-vis Pakistan, but the book details them better than I could do here--one more reason why I had to write this book.
FP: Share with us the tragic story of what happened to U.S. POWs from various wars who reportedly were taken to the Soviet Union. Why the silence on this issue?
Peters: Yeltsin blurted out one drunken day that the Soviets may have taken some U.S. POWs and kept them. Our military leapt on the chance to find out--they were our comrades, time elapsed notwithstanding. But the State Department--the most dysfunctional agency in our government--just wanted to maintain smooth relations with Russia. In trying to uncover the truth, we faced two enemies: The Russian security services (the old KGB in new suits) and our own diplomats. Again, it was heartbreaking. The book lays out the results, but, in short, yeah, the Russians took some of our prisoners from Korea and from the Cold War intelligence-flight period and kept them and--I believe we had sound evidence--executed the last Korean-War survivors in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, when the Russians thought they were winning everywhere and the survivors were just a liability. But, thanks to State, we'll never really know. (Our diplomats just hated military officers--it seemed downright Freudian--and, frankly, it hasn't changed all that much.)
FP: What drug-war mistakes did we make in Latin America? Where else are we headed to repeating those mistakes?
Peters: This is so complex an issue that I can't go into adequate detail here--that's why I wrote the book and the relevant chapters--the drug war with a human face. Suffice to say that we seem determined to make the same mistakes in Afghanistan as we did in Bolivia and elsewhere. We're just pigheaded and want short-term solutions to a complex, very-long-term problem.
FP: In one part of the book you write, “In my experience, no power on earth has done more harm to civilization over the past generation than Saudi Arabia.” (p.205). Please explain for our readers.
Peters: I saw the Saudis doing damage while I was in uniform, and I keep seeing it now. They are our enemies. They cozy up to our "elite," then fund extremism all around the Muslim world (personally, I wish I could apply Sharia law against any American university or think-tank that accepts Saudi Funding). Again and again, from Central Asia to Kenya to northern Virginia, and from Indonesia to Senegal, I've seen how the Saudis use their oil profits to prevent Muslims from integrating into host societies and to foster ferocious anti-American hatred. If I could do one single thing to make this a better world, I'd make the entire Saudi royal family disappear. And by the way--they're also the worst enemy Muslims have, too. The key to understanding the Saudis is to realize that they don't give a damn about individual Muslims--they only care about their perverted Wahhabi vision of Islam. Human suffering doesn't bother them at all--as long as those bloated pigs in nightgowns don't suffer themselves. Can you tell I don't think much of the Saudis? Am I tipping my hand here? Guess I won't be getting a Christmas card from Prince Bandar.
FP: What is Washington in denial about?
Peters: You name it. Reality. Islamist extremism. Putin. China. Immigration. Washington is clinging passionately to the pathetically failed 20th-century theories of international relations its creatures learned at Harvard or Princeton. Washingtonians, Democrat and Republican alike, are as out of touch with global down-and-dirty reality as Osama bin Laden in his cave--if not moreso. Washington is a city that indulges itself in pleasant foreign-policy fantasies--at our expense.
FP: Ralph Peters, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Peters: Thanks back at ya, Jamie. I always appreciate a chance to speak to your audience.
Ellie
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/19/2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in infantry and intelligence units before becoming a Foreign Area Officer and a global strategic scout for the Pentagon. He is the author of more than twenty books, which include Wars of Blood and Faith and Never Quit the Fight, as well as hundreds of columns for the New York Post, Armed Forces Journal, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and other publications. He is the author of the new book Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World.
FP: Ralph Peters, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Peters: Jamie, it's always an honor and a pleasure.
FP: Your new memoir describes many of the foreign adventures you experienced that shaped your views on future conflicts. What made you write this memoir now?
Peters: Well, I could say that I wanted to be right on time for the Georgia crisis, given that the book opens with my experiences in Georgia and the Caucasus on the eve of the Soviet collapse, but the straightforward answer is that you write a book when the book insists on being written.
For years, when my Army buddies and I would swap after-dinner stories by the fire (on the third bottle of wine), a point would come in the evening when one would say, "Man, you've got to write that down!" But I never did--I felt that writing anything that resembled a memoir would be an act of absurd vanity. Then, as the book's introduction explains, I found myself in a ratty hotel on the Turkish side of the Iraqi border in the middle of the night (waiting to be smuggled into Iraq by Kurds back in 2004), and the lightning bolt struck: In an instant, I felt compelled to write down the best tales of gallant friends and extraordinary times, of a few spooky moments and some downright absurd ones, in an unorthodox military career that took me from the dying Soviet Union and the "new" Russia, through Central Asia, Pakistan, Burma, Laos, Thailand, the Andean Ridge drug countries of Latin America--and, ultimately, our border with Mexico and even downtown L.A. That night, far from home, I felt the overwhelming need to capture my magnificent comrades on the page and to preserve those lost worlds--worlds eclipsed by September 11, 2001, yet which led directly to it.
In the end, this is a book of enjoyable stories--some laugh-out-loud funny. But it's also a deadly serious picture, from the mud, blood and dust level, of how we got to where we are today.
FP: The book provides a street-level account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the often-ugly birth of the post-Soviet world. Can you talk a bit about the devastation caused by Communism and socialist policies?
Peters: My first direct experience with the monstrosity of socialism came in 1972, in the former Yugoslavia. I was an undergraduate off to see the world for the summer. And, as described in the book, my first whiff of Belgrade taught me the indelible lesson that the problem with dialectical materialism is that the dialectic never delivers the material. All of my later experiences with the malignant, vicious Soviet empire only reinforced that first impression drawn from Tito's communism-lite.
Bad form to quote oneself, but there's a line in the book that states that the tombstone of the unknown Soviet citizen would read "Died of neglect." We didn't beat the Soviets with bombers and missiles. We beat them with supermarkets, with free markets--and personal freedom.
I saw, first-hand, the human tragedies, the wastage, the casual cruelty of the Soviet system toward its citizen-prisoners. The first part of the book tries to tell their stories--of decent human beings trapped hopelessly in a world of Lenin-meets-Kafka. The only good thing about communism and socialism was the stirring rhetoric. But that rhetoric was completely empty--and perverted by the cynics who always seized power after killing the idealists:
No idealist survives very long in any system constructed on the basis of an abstract, intellectual ideology. My experiences with the Soviet empire, in all its forms, burned a lifelong hatred of all ideologies into me--and we must always remember that one of our blessings in the USA is that we're not ideologues, but pragmatists--we're all "from Missouri." Democracy is not an ideology--it's a technique for political organization that uses elections as a tool. Today, we Americans are at our worst (and most European) when we subscribe to any formal ideology.
FP: Tell us about the military officers who had vital knowledge who were dismissed by Washington during the Clinton years. What were the consequences?
Peters: It was heartbreaking. My close circle of comrades and I--all Russian speakers and adventurers by nature--would dive into the guts of the Soviet Union (often at our own expense, by the way--there was always money to buy new billion-dollar satellites, but no money for officers like us to crawl over the Soviet sickbed and discover things no satellite can see). We'd come back with first-hand accounts of the developing ethnic strife, of the corruption, of the KGB/FSB's machinations, even with battlefield reports we risked our lives to gather--and back in Washington we were just blown off (not by the Army, but by the CIA, the other intel agencies and the administration).
If the intelligence didn't benefit Boeing or Lockheed Martin and cost billions, it was written off as worthless. There was zero value placed on human intelligence--it was surreal. I'd come back from Country X with an eyewitness account and some twenty-something Clintonista who'd never been farther from the USA than Cancun would tell me that I didn't know what I was talking about. And the State Department, with its pathetic apparatchiks, was the worst of all--as the book recounts, I once returned to our embassy in Armenia with a first-hand account of fighting where there wasn't supposed to be any--and our diplomat on duty, who was cowering in the embassy, terrified of leaving the Yerevan city limits, essentially called me a liar. My views just didn't match the Clinton administration’s, and State actually trusted the reports from the Armenian government over the word of a U.S. Army officer.
FP: Pakistan is at the center of our conflict. When was it already clear that we were headed for big problems in terms of Pakistan and when did Washington know it?
Peters: When I went to Pakistan to work with its military in 1994/1995, the problems were already looming. Charlie Wilson's War may be exaggerated for dramatic effect, but it's essentially correct that, once the Russians abandoned Afghanistan, we washed our hands of a region flooded with arms and Islamist extremists we'd given steroid shots. The Pakistani generals desperately wanted our help in dealing with Islamist extremism--but, once again, the Clinton regime wasn't interested. All the Clintons cared about was their beloved Benazir Bhutto, who spoke lovely English and talked democracy--while she used Saudi funding to pursue nuclear weapons. Benazir Bhutto was a vicious witch who, helped by her criminal husband (now in power, thanks) looted Pakistan--when she was assassinated I refused to mourn her. She despised and exploited her own people, and the Clintons just thought she was Betsy Ross in a Ferragamo scarf. There were countless other mistakes made vis-à-vis Pakistan, but the book details them better than I could do here--one more reason why I had to write this book.
FP: Share with us the tragic story of what happened to U.S. POWs from various wars who reportedly were taken to the Soviet Union. Why the silence on this issue?
Peters: Yeltsin blurted out one drunken day that the Soviets may have taken some U.S. POWs and kept them. Our military leapt on the chance to find out--they were our comrades, time elapsed notwithstanding. But the State Department--the most dysfunctional agency in our government--just wanted to maintain smooth relations with Russia. In trying to uncover the truth, we faced two enemies: The Russian security services (the old KGB in new suits) and our own diplomats. Again, it was heartbreaking. The book lays out the results, but, in short, yeah, the Russians took some of our prisoners from Korea and from the Cold War intelligence-flight period and kept them and--I believe we had sound evidence--executed the last Korean-War survivors in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, when the Russians thought they were winning everywhere and the survivors were just a liability. But, thanks to State, we'll never really know. (Our diplomats just hated military officers--it seemed downright Freudian--and, frankly, it hasn't changed all that much.)
FP: What drug-war mistakes did we make in Latin America? Where else are we headed to repeating those mistakes?
Peters: This is so complex an issue that I can't go into adequate detail here--that's why I wrote the book and the relevant chapters--the drug war with a human face. Suffice to say that we seem determined to make the same mistakes in Afghanistan as we did in Bolivia and elsewhere. We're just pigheaded and want short-term solutions to a complex, very-long-term problem.
FP: In one part of the book you write, “In my experience, no power on earth has done more harm to civilization over the past generation than Saudi Arabia.” (p.205). Please explain for our readers.
Peters: I saw the Saudis doing damage while I was in uniform, and I keep seeing it now. They are our enemies. They cozy up to our "elite," then fund extremism all around the Muslim world (personally, I wish I could apply Sharia law against any American university or think-tank that accepts Saudi Funding). Again and again, from Central Asia to Kenya to northern Virginia, and from Indonesia to Senegal, I've seen how the Saudis use their oil profits to prevent Muslims from integrating into host societies and to foster ferocious anti-American hatred. If I could do one single thing to make this a better world, I'd make the entire Saudi royal family disappear. And by the way--they're also the worst enemy Muslims have, too. The key to understanding the Saudis is to realize that they don't give a damn about individual Muslims--they only care about their perverted Wahhabi vision of Islam. Human suffering doesn't bother them at all--as long as those bloated pigs in nightgowns don't suffer themselves. Can you tell I don't think much of the Saudis? Am I tipping my hand here? Guess I won't be getting a Christmas card from Prince Bandar.
FP: What is Washington in denial about?
Peters: You name it. Reality. Islamist extremism. Putin. China. Immigration. Washington is clinging passionately to the pathetically failed 20th-century theories of international relations its creatures learned at Harvard or Princeton. Washingtonians, Democrat and Republican alike, are as out of touch with global down-and-dirty reality as Osama bin Laden in his cave--if not moreso. Washington is a city that indulges itself in pleasant foreign-policy fantasies--at our expense.
FP: Ralph Peters, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Peters: Thanks back at ya, Jamie. I always appreciate a chance to speak to your audience.
Ellie