Q: What won the Cold War? A: DETERRENCE....end of transmission
So has the author of this piece apparently.
L
One of the most perverse aspects of anti-Americanism in the global media and among the international intelligentsia is that it's presented as a progressive, liberal movement, when it's bitterly reactionary, a spiteful, elitist revolt against the empowerment of the common man and woman (the core ethos of the United States). Despite their outward differences, intellectuals are the logical allies of Islamist extremists--who are equally opposed to social progress and mass freedom.
Well said!
Superb analysis.
read,,bumping for reference
This is a great read -- long, but excellent.
This article is a very good read - Peter's usually always is -
I actually became stupider, with every line of this article that I read.
Excellent read. This compliments the essay by the Brit General of last week or so. Revised thinking is constantly needed.
Will this be a Preface to Ralph's new book? lol
And it's a straw man to attack the "revolution in military affairs," which has long been outmoded. The new thinking is to constantly get inside the decision loops of terrorists, and we are doing a phenomenal job of this. Peters obviously was struggling for a topic.
You would be better off to consider my forthcoming book, "America's Victories: Why Americans Win Wars and Will Win the War on Terror." And we will do so with minimal casualties, not excessive casualties as Peters prophesies.
Many of us have struggled to grasp the unreasonable, even fanatical anti-Americanism in the global media--including the hostility in many news outlets and entertainment forums here at home. How can educated men and women, whether they speak Arabic, Spanish, French, or English, condemn America's every move, while glossing over the abuses of dictators and the savagery of terrorists? Why is America blamed even when American involvement is minimal or even nonexistent? How has the most beneficial great power in history been transformed by the international media into a villain of relentless malevolence?
There's a straightforward answer: In their secular way, the world's media elites are as unable to accept the reality confronting them as are Islamist fundamentalists. They hate the world in which they are forced to live, and America has shaped that world.
It isn't that the American-wrought world is so very bad for the global intelligentsia: The freedom they exploit to condemn the United States has been won, preserved, and expanded by American sacrifices and America's example. The problem is that they wanted a different world, the utopia promised by socialist and Marxist theorists, an impossible heaven on earth that captured their imagination as surely as visions of paradise enrapture suicide bombers.
U.N. pushing to end nation-states: Plan drafted to end disease, poverty, war
WorldNetDaily ^ | 1/30/06 | WorldNetDaily
Posted on 01/30/2006 5:54:00 AM PST by wagglebee
The U.N. has a plan to make every Miss America Pageant contestant happy by bringing about "world peace."
All it will take, says the draft of a visionary proposal by the U.N. Development Program, is to getting rid of all the pesky nations of the world.
In fact, the plan endorsed by prominent world figures including Nobel laureates, bankers, politicians and economists to end nation-states as we know them is also designed to end health pandemics, poverty and "global warming." So far, the U.N. hasn't mentioned whether the proposal will do anything for obesity.
The U.N. says an unprecedented outbreak of co-operation between countries, applied through six specific financial tools, would serve as pretty much a cure-all for the world's ills and generate an extra $7 trillion in economic growth.
The authors of the ambitious report don't expect nations to fold up and take the hint any time soon. But the idea is to start the ball rolling – and maybe years or decades from now the world will actually be ready to listen.
Most of the focus of the U.N. plan is on global warming – a climate change phenomenon some consider to be more theory than reality. But it seems to be the central component in the U.N.'s globalization scheme for the future – the very organizing principal behind the push to eliminate borders, sovereign governments and autonomous nation-states.
If the scheme seems far-fetched, consider that it already has the backing of the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the London Independent.
The U.N. plan includes six immediate action steps:
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pollution permit trading;
Cut poor countries' borrowing costs by securing the debts against the income from table parts of their economies;
Reduce government debt costs by linking payments to the country's economic output;
An aggressive campaign of worldwide vaccinations;
Tapping into the vast flow of money from migrants back to their home country;
Aid agencies underwriting loans to market investors to lower interest rates.
It's not the first time the U.N. has come out openly to suggest global government is the only solution to the world's problems. "Our Global Neighborhood" was a 410-page final report of the Commission on Global Governance, and was first published in 1995 by Oxford University Press. That 28-member "independent commission," created by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, developed the following strategy, as reported in the EcoSocialist Review: "To represent a shot-across-the-bow of George Bush's New World Order, and make clear that now is the time to press for the subordination of national sovereignty to democratic transnationalism."
Then-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed the commission, and the U.N. provided significant funding. The plan calls for dramatically strengthening the United Nations, by implementing a laundry list of recommendations, including these:
Eliminating the veto and permanent member status in the Security Council;
Authorizing global taxation on currency exchange and use of the "global commons;"
Creating an International Criminal Court;
Creating a standing army under the command of the secretary-general;
Creating a new Economic Security Council;
Creating a new People's Assembly;
Regulating multinational corporations;
Regulating the global commons;
Controlling the manufacture, sale and distribution of all firearms.
And none of those recommendations were new. All had been proposed in a variety of documents for decades by various groups and individuals. However, this did mark the first time the comprehensive plan for global governance was published with the approval and funding support of the United Nations.
To justify the sweeping changes proposed by the commission, a new concept of "security" was offered. The U.N.'s mission under its present charter is to provide "security" to its member nations through "collective" action. The new concept expands the mission of the U.N. to be the security of the people – and the security of the planet.
Thus, in their speeches to the U.N.'s Millennium Assembly in 2000, both Secretary General Kofi Annan and President Bill Clinton made reference to this new concept, saying national sovereignty could no longer be used as an excuse to prevent the intervention by the U.N. to provide "security" for people inside national boundaries.
To provide security for the planet, the plan called for authorizing the U.N. Trusteeship Council to have "trusteeship" over the "global commons," which the plan defines to be: " ... the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the related environment and life-support systems that contribute to the support of human life."
We have reached the point (as evidenced by the first battle of Falluja) where the global media can overturn the verdict of the battlefield. We will not be defeated by suicide bombers in Iraq, but a chance remains that the international media may defeat us. Engaged with enemies to our front, we try to ignore the enemies at our back--enemies at whom we cannot return fire. Indeed, if anything must be profoundly reevaluated, it's our handling of the media in wartime. We have no obligation to open our accounts to proven enemies, yet we allow ourselves to be paralyzed by platitudes.
So much of this article is spot on - A worthy full read for everyone -
ping
I'm unclear on what the author actually wants to do. Improve our "strength of will," boost the size of the military, freeze out media that we perceive to be inimical to our purposes, or what?
For example, he tells us that the Chinese are developing alternative means to gain access to fuel if we embargo them in wartime. But the devil is in the details and Peters is vague at best on how they will accomplish this.
He gets an A for trying to talk sense to the Pentagon brass and an A+ for his understanding of what drives the Jihadis, but no better than a C- on the risks we face in the future.
Of course they can. Our enemies foreign and domestic are upset that our power prevents them from ruling the world. There is remarkably little there.
The writer thinks getting hysterical is an argument, it isn't. So do our enemies, and that is why they are losing.
We don't care about the "soaring wills" of our enemies because we aren't trying to convince them of anything. When men abandon reason you kill them. Very simple, too simple for the author of this piece to understand. This is not a way of trying to persuade them of something. It is a means of living in a world from which they are concretely and individually absent.
As for the unanswered flood of lies, it has brought the liars nothing. They lose power everywhere, slowly but inexorably. Similarly, the terrorists in their paradise have accomplished nothing. They die in squalor, our civilization hums along. They've elevated the ambient noise level slightly and underlined the importance of various perennial virtues - so what? We have them, in any desired quantity.
The media can't win the battle for Fallujah. In case everybody forgot, the "insurgents" of Fallujah were slaughtered, and nobody blinked an eye.
Of course our own strength of will is important in this or in any other war. But strength of will comes from justice, not from blatant disregard of it. The author thinks the suicides are stronger and winning, when the facts on the ground clearly show otherwise. Our soldiers are not daunted by them. Their numbers do not dwindle. They stand their posts and shoot down all comers, as fast as those choose to come.
The terrorists and their make believer communists expect to stop the greatest military empire in history and the juggernaut of capitalism with vain gestures of defiance, spitballs, and leading editorials. They might as readily try to knock down a brick wall by playing tennis at it. It hasn't moved us an inch, while they have lost 50 million souls, several countries, tens of thousands of combatants, etc.
We are supposed to be scared of this? At least the Germans actually had a chance, if they had done everything ten times smarter than they did. The only hope these have is that one lot group of our enemies is willing to surrender to another group of our enemies.
The instant they realize we will take the pacifism of the first lot at its face value, and therefore defy them whatever they do, they will begin to notice how comprehensively they have been defeated. What is a pacifist going to threaten me with? Another stern leading editorial? ("Electoral defeat", they will say. And when I ignore their imaginary laws as readily as our foreign enemies do, what then? Will they write more stern leading editorials?)