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BLOOD AND GUTS PETERS. Everybody's talking about Ralph Peters's "give up on Iraq" bit, and I think that Glenn Greenwald and Spencer, among others, have demonstrated how dishonest and incoherent his new position is. Peter's previous argument is also worth some attention, as he summarizes what has come to be the new dodge on the war, the idea that we would have succeeded if we had just been more willing to massacre us some Iraqis. The argument has become quite common, and goes something like this:
The war was lost because we won too quickly and too cleanly. If the Iraqis had suffered mass casualties on the same level as, say, the Germans or Japanese in World War II, they would have become quiet and docile. Domestic liberals and international organizations can be blamed for our failure since it is they who prevented us from using the necessary brutality.The argument is popular because it places the blame for defeat squarely upon those least deserving, the UN and the Democratic Party. Moreover, it attributes the problem (implicitly or explicitly) to the fact that liberals aren't really man enough to acknowledge that slaughtering people is often a necessary part of war. Finally, it depends not in the slightest on any historical analysis. If you don't present any data, then no data can be critiqued or properly analyzed. All we really have is an assertion of a relationship (more killing = more docility) with a couple of data points invoked (Germany and Japan) while literally thousands of points are ignored. For example, one might mention that, while Germany and Japan suffered heavy casualties in World War II, those casualties were considerably lower than those suffered by other countries that continued to struggle, including Poland, China, and Russia. One might also note that Vietnam suffered casualties far in excess (corrected for population) of either Japan or Germany, yet continued to fight long after the United States had backed away. So, what we have is an argument that has appalling policy implications (why worry about precision guidance, since killing a few extra is a good thing?), has virtually no evidentiary support, and isn't even logically compelling (it's unclear why people react to their neighbors' deaths by surrendering, rather than by resisting more vigorously). In short, it's an argument that's tailor made for the wingnutosphere.
--Robert Farley
