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Title: Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0-8117-0024-0 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A fascinating look at the challenges facing America
Comment: If it were in my power I would make this book required reading for every officer in the US Military and every senior leader in the Pentagon and State Department. In "Beyond Terror" Ralph Peters gives us the best and most accurate look at the threats and challenges facing American presently and in the near future. He discusses in detail the background to the war we are fighting now and that our children will fight in years to come. Peters is one of the few authors today who is not afraid to call a spade a spade. His writing is literate, but refreshingly free of the conventions of political correctness that seem to infest present day writings about non-western cultures. He candidly points out the difficulties facing many nations in the underdeveloped (or in the case of the Gulf Arabs; unwisely developed) world. Like a good knowledgable doctor looking at an illness in its advanced stages, some of Peters' prognosis for these societies is quite grim. However, it is accurate. Peters has a natural and conversational writing style that carries the reader along easily. Peters makes his points with wit and charm. There are lines in this book that are laugh out loud funny. Although this is a book about policy and America's place in the world, you don't have to be a wonk to enjoy it. Each of it's 18 essays can be read as a stand alone piece.
This is an honest, funny, informative and ultimately uplifting book to read. Ralph Peters, above everything else, is an American Patriot and he outlines in this book his vision for the New American century. His vision of the world is one to which our leaders should pay attention.
Rating: 5
Summary: Terrific Book
Comment: Beyond Terror is a compilation of superb essays written by the most gifted military theorist of his generation. These essays predominantly examine the current terrorist threat. The reader should be aware that Ralph Peters is one of the very few writers in this arcane area of study that accurately foresaw the possibility of 9/11.
If you want to know why Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, read this book. If you want to know how such terrorists can best be attacked, read this book. If you want a clearer understanding of the terrorist threat, read this book. If you are tired of academic analysis on terrorism, that says much but clarifies little, read this book.
The author is one of the best traveled of the writers on contemporary terrorism. He knows his subject. A former US Army Intelligence Officer, Peters writes with honesty and conviction. Whether you agree or disagree with his analysis, you won't have any difficulty understanding his positions. Such clarity of thought is rare and valuable.
More importantly, this reviewer believes that Peters more often than not is correct in his assessments. His opinions are based in a multi-disciplinary approach to his subject matter... using the intellectual tools of psychologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. This approach explains much while obfuscating nothing.
Ralph Peters' work is highly recommended because he insists on gaining first-hand experience before writing his opinions... an unusual and laudable characteristic. Beyond Terror is the best of contemporary writings on the critical topic of terrorism.
Rating: 4
Summary: Machiavelli updated and shock-jocked
Comment: It's easy to get swept up in the rhetoric that jumps so glibly from the adroit fingertips of the verbally gifted former army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. Indeed Peters occasionally gets swept up in it himself. For example, while marveling at the rapid change and dislocation characteristic of our times (so that "the collapse of the Roman Empire looks glacial by comparison"), Peters is lead to exclaim, "Much of humanity is returning to the days of witches, anti-Christ, and self-willed apocalypse." (p. 87)
Well, not exactly. The degenerating culture in the Middle East that Peters so well delineates in the second essay in this collection has nothing to do with Christian apocalyptic delusions, nor have the horrors experienced by the people in sub Saharan Africa. And while there are nut cases in this country (as there have always been in Europe and the US) that believe in witches and warlocks and the Biblical anti-Christ, most of humanity is actually just trying to make a living.
Peters also loses it a bit when he writes "Men like to kill." He adds that some dislike it, but "the latter are few." Furthermore, "For many men, there is no more empowering act than taking a human life." (p. 83)
Again the generalization would be acceptable if indeed it applied to even a bare 51% of humanity. But it doesn't. The thugs and henchmen and Saddam Hussein-like warlords and bullies are greatly in the minority. Otherwise we could hardly cross the street. Peters shows that he realizes that he is overstating the case when he writes: "The crucial violence is usually perpetrated by a smallish number of actors...with a still larger group enjoying the spectacle of the violence and, perhaps looting." (pp. 86-87)
This is closer to the truth. Most people do not actually like to kill. We like to get others to do it for us. We don't even like to kill the cows and the pigs that we eat. We have specialists to do that for us.
It would be easy to dismiss Peters as a kind shock jock for those that can read or a postmodern son of Strangelove were it not for the fact that he is often right, and that he makes some critical points that cannot be ignored. He is especially effective in the opening essays in the book, "Our Place in History" which was written for this volume, and the above mentioned second essay, "When Devils Walk the Earth: The Mentality and Roots of Terrorism and How to Respond," which was written for a thinktank a month after September 11th, and could easily serve as guidance for President Bush. I suspect Bush has read this essay, although I don't expect him to admit it publically. Peters's Machiavellian advice would not play well in the media and is not the sort of reasoning that heads of state reveal to the public.
In the first essay (also perhaps given as advice to the Commander-in-Chief) Peters calls for an "enlightened" American empire, arguing that given the state of real politics in the world, mainly that we are the only superpower left, we have no choice but to accept the mantle and do our best.
I think there is more truth to this than most people, both here and especially in Europe, would like to admit. He makes the salient point that the American empire (already a partial reality) differs from that of Rome in that "our empire is cultural and economic, a matter of influence and the occasional exercise of military power, and not one of conquests and exploitation." (p. 19) I would add that our battalions take the form of multi-national corporations that serve to direct tribute and lucre to the US through economic power rather than by force of the sword.
In "When Devils..." Peters psychoanalyzes the Islamic Middle East coming up with an indictment that could be summed up with these words from page 46: "We [the vibrant, creative states of the West and the Pacific Rim] are succeeding, the Islamic world is failing, and they hate us for it." This is almost exactly the diagnosis presented (more gently) by Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis in his books, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002) and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Holy Terror (2003), and it is one that I think is substantially correct.
The central point of the essay however is to make a distinction between "practical terrorists" who just want to seize power, and "apocalyptic terrorists" who want to destroy our civilization and kill us all. Peters presents a 25-point "take no prisoners" program for dealing with such "monsters." His advice, simply put, is kill them before they kill us. By the way, his contention that apocalyptic Islamic terrorists are typically unable to form lasting, healthy relationships with the opposite sex (p. 33) and are the products of "sexual fears and humiliation as young adults" rings only too true. He recalls that September 11th hijacker Mohammed Atta demanded that "women not be allowed to pollute his grave by their presence." (p. 11)
Also good is the third essay in which Peters emphasizes the strength of free flowing information and how closed societies such as those in Islamic lands and North Korea are at a disadvantage economically and militarily because of their self-imposed ignorance. It is only in the fourth essay, "Heavy Peace," that Peters begins to reveal that in places he is patching over the cracks in his understanding with rhetoric.
I would also like to observe that his central message, that we must meet terror with terror, needs to be thoroughly examined lest we allow the end to justify the means and tumble down the slippery slope to the level of our terrorist enemies.
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Title: Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0811700844 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0811706516 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0671751727 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Twilight of Heroes by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0811726908 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Flames of Heaven by Ralph Peters ISBN: 0811726843 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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