Ralph Peters - Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization

ENDLESS WAR

Books by Ralph Peters

Nonfiction

Looking for Trouble
Wars of Blood and Faith
New Glory
Never Quit the Fight
Beyond Baghdad
Beyond Terror
Fighting for the Future

Fiction

The Offificers Club
The War After Armageddon
Traitor
The Devils Garden
Twilight of Heroes
The Perfect Soldier
flames of Heaven
The War in 2020
Red Army
Bravo Romeo

Writing as Owen Parry

Fiction

Rebels of Babylon
Bold Sons of Erin
Honors Kingdom (Hammett Award)
Call Each River Jordan
Shadows of Glory
Faded Coat of Blue (Herodotus Award)
Our Simple Gifts
Strike the Harp

ENDLESS WAR

Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization

Ralph Peters

STACKPOLE
BOOKS

Copyright 2010 by Ralph Peters

First published in paperback in 2011 by
STACKPOLE BOOKS
5067 Ritter Road
Mechanicsburg, PA 17055
www.stackpolebooks.co

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in the United States

First paperback edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21

Front cover photo (left) Jzef Brandt, Walka o sztandar turecki,
National Museum of Krakow
Front cover photo (right) 2009 NPR
Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.
Cover design by Caroline M. Stover

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0823-4 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 0-8117-0823-3 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peters, Ralph, 1952
Endless war : Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization / Ralph Peters.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0550-9 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-8117-0550-1 (hardcover)
1. Comparative civilization. 2. Civilization, Western. 3. Civilization, Islamic. 4. Islam and world politics. 5. East and West. 6. Violence Religious aspects. 7. TerrorismReligious aspects. I. Title.
CB251.P484 2010
909'.09821dc22

2009031232

To Friend Peters, an uncle I never met,
gassed on the Western Front in 1918.

And to John Parfitt and Robert Parfitt, uncles wounded
a day apart in the final push to the Rhine in 1945.

Their country called. They answered.

May they rest in peace.

Search into the essence of each matter, whether of doctrine, practice or belief.

Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations

The citizens of the United States do not stand apart from history. We are in it and of it. Many of our ancestors came here hoping to escape it, but history is a pack of bloodhounds. Desperate to put those persistent dogs off the scent, we embrace fantasies in preference to facts. When the baying grows too near, we succumb to superstitious rituals, chanting that peace is the natural order of things and behaving as if violence were a spook we might drive away with Ivy-League fetishes and bouts of self-flagellation.

History so threatens us that its serious instruction has been stripped from our schools, replaced by narratives meant to correct the social views of children. Teachers know little; children learn less; and myths flourish. At the university level, the discipline of history has been perverted and the historian abandons his duty to society like a medieval doctor fleeing the plague. Careers are made by decades of concentration on dental hygiene in a hamlet in twelfth-century Languedoc, rather than in a struggle to comprehend the human excesses that haunt the centuries. The effect of character upon events is downplayed, while religion is regarded with nostrils pinched shut. Above all, the study of warfarethat infernally addictive human activityis shunned in horror.

Once cherished, history is currently viewed as onerous unless employed for social engineering. The results are political leaders who cannot weigh the consequences of their actions; journalists who confuse the exciting with the significant; military officers who view their profession through peepholes; and impatient citizens easily misled. In place of history, we get hysterical headlines.

A solid grounding in history wont provide us with maps to the future, but helps us frame risks and analyze behaviors. It may not hand us a repair manual, but offers a dashboard full of warning lights. It gives us the context essential to understanding the events of our time in their gravity and fullness. Above all, history that adheres to facts inoculates the citizen against lies.

A paradox of todays American society is that our best-educated citizens have the least sense of historical reality. When genial professors play pretend, students are only too glad to play along, and when the man or woman behind the podium absolves them of the responsibilities of service, translating their timidity into imagined courage and assuring them that war doesnt change anything, how many students feel compelled to question the dispensation? The clever subversive panders to the young.

But in the real worldin which even academics perishwar often changes everything. The blood-drunk killer is rarely disarmed by the man who lives in booksor by the eternal adolescent clinging to the lie that all men want peace.

History isnt comforting, and therein lies its public-relations problem. Recent bursts of violence notwithstanding, we Americans have been blessed to live in such deep peace, prosperity, and comfort for so long that we find humankinds record unbearable: We want no part of it. For the man or woman whose notion of tragedy is a cancelled vacation, the mad butchery splashing history with blood is socially unacceptable.

But were a species that fights when sufficiently frustrated. And under the brutal pressures of globalization, human frustrations will increase throughout our lifetimes. We face an era of endless war, relieved only by interludes of exhaustion.

We may wish it otherwiseand I dobut history insists that were murderous animals, and the worst among us feel most alive when inflicting pain on others. We cry that All men want peace, but some do not (few peace activists would care for a police-free world). One of our most-dangerous illusions holds that the rights of monsters in human form must be protected. And so, in our crusades to save terrorists and mass murderers from punishment, we condemn the billions who do want peace to suffer the rule of the gun: When we elevate the cause of the killers above the security of the citizenry, we are guilty of a profoundly perverse elitism. Yesteryears fairy tales warned us not to trust the wolves, but todays well-brought-up children are expected to consider the wolfs needs and discontents.

Sometimes, though, the wolf still needs to be killed.

To study what men have done is to see ourselves as we are: Historys mirror disintegrates our makeup. With its casualty lists, litany of atrocities, and suggestions that heroism, too, may require violence, history shows us the skull beneath the skin. And no matter how firmly we shut our eyes, the skull will still be there.

In selecting the essays, articles, and columns for this collection, I found myself drawn to those most deeply rooted in history. My own view of the world has always been shaped by what knowledge of the past I could assemble, but Ive never felt so frustrated as I do now by the historical illiteracy of those who make policy, mold opinions, and vote. Listening to a talking head or reading a newspaper column, I all too often want to bellow, Read some [expletive deleted] history, for Gods sake.... But when we have a vice president who believes that Franklin Delano Roosevelt communicated with the American people via television during the Depression and a president who insists that Islam played a major role in our countrys early development, one can hardly fault the average citizen for lacking a historical perspective on casualty rates.