Friday, July 24, 2009

Why Is Ralph Peters So Angry?


by Karen Kwiatkowski

"....Not for the Taliban – no, Peters and the rest of the American war machinery in the Middle East want the Taliban. They need the Taliban and they need it big, bad, and brutal. This is "The Enemy" and it helps keep the homefront from falling off the war wagon, something the American public is increasingly doing in an age where a hundred seeds of newthink on the righteousness of the federal warfare/welfare state have found fertile ground.

Peters’ bloodlust is based on his inside track idea that Private Bergdahl, in an act of unspeakable and awesome defiance, deserted the Afghanistan campaign. That perhaps Bergdahl had become sympathetic to the Afghans we have been destroying. Perhaps he got fed up with what he was being told to do. Perhaps he discovered he wasn’t cut out to be a merc, or maybe he was captured (as Taliban media suggested, the drunken private stumbled out of his garrison) because military order had broken down. Whatever it was, for Peters to become enraged over soldier "disloyalty" indicates extreme fear. Is Bergdahl representative of other Army trends in Afghanistan like torture prisons and mass murder of civilians that we ought to know about? ......."

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