Kill For Peace, Part I
Kill For Peace, Part I

 Part I.  Analysis

 The best analysis I have read of America’s foreign policy failings since the unfinished Persian Gulf War of 1991 will be found in the writings of Ralph Peters, a retired American army Intelligence officer who worked and studied in dozens of countries as well as in the U.S. Executive office.

If there is a single power the U.S. underestimates it is the power of collective hatred, meaning the hatred that animates the Arab-Islamic world.   

This failing applies to Israel.

Like their American counterparts, Israel’s ruling elites do not “understand the delicious appeal of hatred.”  They will not face the fact that man is a killer.  They have learned nothing from the genocidal wars and wholesale massacres of the twentieth century, not merely in Nazi Germany, but also in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan—to name only a few.  

There is at least a minority of human beings who enjoy killing.  That minority may be small, says Peters, but it does not take many enthusiastic killers to trigger a genocidal war.  The Arab Palestinian Authority consists of such killers. 

Indeed, they have educated a generation of Arab children to become killers.

Like the United States, Israel plays by rules, some encoded in its own laws or in international laws, others in long-established customs, which are part of the West’s collective consciousness.  But Israel’s enemies don’t give a damn about our laws and customs. 

Again and again we find that hard-won treaties or agreements mean nothing to our enemies.  While we are word- or talk-oriented, out enemies are action-oriented.  We mirror-image and think that our enemies are like us, that they want peace, even though they have repeatedly said, “peace means the destruction of Israel.”  I

Israelis live in a state of denial.

Even the terms we use to describe the enemy—whether we name them “terrorists” or “Islamic fundamentalists”—are misleading.  Such terms hinder the political and military echelons from developing an appropriate strategy against the enemy.   Ralph Peters calls these terrorists “warriors,” because he wants Americans to take terrorists more seriously.   He speaks of five different types of warriors—because if we do not understand the enemy, we won’t win the war against them.

● One pool of warriors comes from the underclass, a male who has no stake in peace, a loser with little education and little legal earning power.  It’s easy to recruit such warriors against the Great or against the Little Satan.  These warriors are bloody savages.

● A second pool of warriors consists of youth and young men who join and fight for the Arab cause.  Their savagery increases with the duration and intensity of the conflict.

● A third pool of warriors consists of opportunists, entrepreneurs who profit from the conflict.  They traffic in arms and drugs.  Their great strength is their cynicism.  The Palestinian kleptocracy—Mahmoud Abbas belongs to this pool.  They are chameleons and very dangerous.  This type of warrior is the most likely to be underestimated, especially by wishful-thinking Jews.

● A fourth pool of warriors consists of true believers like Osama bin Laden, or like Abdullah Badran, the 21 year-old university student who blew himself up in Tel Aviv nightclub. These warriors fight out of religious conviction and become infected with bloodlust.  They are the products of a failed civilization that blames the Americans or Zionists for its inability to adapt to modernity and compete with the West.  They burn with resentment and the desire for revenge.

● Dispossessed or otherwise failed military men form the fifth and most immediately dangerous wool of warriors.

But the greatest danger to Israel and the United States is when the cynic is working together with the true believer.       

All of these warriors are habituated to violence; they have no stake in civil order.  Unlike soldiers, they do not play by the rules of the Geneva convention; they do not respect human life; treaties mean nothing to them; and they regard compromise as equivalent to prostitution.  Negotiation with warriors is sheer folly. 

We should not negotiate with them until they surrender.  Until then, they must be killed.

Unfortunately, Israelis, like Americans, believe that all men want peace, that all conflict can be resolved through compromise and understanding.  But many men have no stake in peace.  Many would be bored by peace, and would lose honor or be out a job with peace.  You find such men in the Palestinian Authority—in Fatah, Tanzim, Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and so on. 

● American and Israeli opinion-makers refuse to believe that many human beings thrive and profit on disorder and on killing other human beings. 

● Americans, profit from peace; warriors profit from war, and Israelis suffer the consequences.

● Both American and Israelis talk about a war against “terrorism,” a war that is actually against Islam, a jihadic culture that breeds terrorists.

As Ralph Peters points out, we refuse to understand that certain human beings cannot accept that their culture is failing.  These human beings do not realize that they are failing individually because of the mode of thought and behavior to which their culture has conditioned them.  They want someone to blame, and they want revenge on that someone.

But our academics and intellectual elites—the educators of our politicians and judges—are so conditioned by the moral relativism that permeates all levels of education in the democratic world, that they cannot think of a failed culture such as Islam.  They would accuse me of racism.  One does not have to be a racist to recognize that Israel’s enemies have some nasty characteristics:

● They regard Israeli peace overtures as a sign of weakness. 

● They have nothing but contempt for Jews who advocate “land for peace.”

● They will not honor any form of agreement a moment longer than it suits their needs. 

● Their contempt for human life inevitably leads them to commit atrocities.

We face an enemy whose sole motivation to refrain from killing is the fear of being killed; but since many of them love of death, the only deterrent is to kill them in sufficient numbers before they kill us.   

(For part II, click here)