One of the people around here who advises Tom sent in this new article by Peters from the Weekly Standard, The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs, under the email title 'Good Ralph Peters'. Tom didn't think so:

And it still makes me want to puke. All are out to get us, or are too weak to help fight. All intellectuals are fools. It's all blood and guts from here out. Warriors are supreme, the rest are nothing. We are losing and can't even realize it. The future will be full of blood and gore and war.

What is there to do with this stuff but be afraid? Being secular or quietly religious isn't evil. It does not make you weak. It is the strength of our civilization. Extending that is all, not climbing into the gutter. That job we leave to professionals, and none of them do it so their world back home can come to approximate Peters' advice.

But our fearless co-reader was not to be dissuaded, and came back with this worthy reply:

I guess it is what you focus on.

What I hear him saying is that a lot of expensive weapons are not the answer to our problems. True.

He specifically says that the fanatics are a minority within Islam, so it is not "everybody is against us". But he goes on to say that we do ourselves no favors by failing to understand them as they understand themselves. This is also true.

As to China, he makes a case parallel to yours -- a war with them would be insanity, and our people are not taking seriously what it would mean or how it would go. This is true.

I think he overstates the case as to "intellectuals", but Peters is Peters and you expect him to be over the top. I think the monopoly of the group he discusses is disintegrating due to the Internet. But I think there is an element of truth to what he says.

Tom closed with:

Yes. But he does so in such a depressing, with-fear-for-all kind of way.

For the average reader, they do indeed focus on the fear. What Peters does is the equivalent of what Frey did: he always jacks it up to the point of scaring people from useful action by making the struggle seem far worse than it really needs to be--or is.

And there is real harm in a call to arms than dissuades and depresses more than it persuades and inspires.

I truly believe that, FWIW.

What do you think?