Jim Henley debunks another lying Republican toad(y)

I’m not saying Ralph Peters is flat out lying in his much-linked column of today. I’m sure there are actual facts in it. But they are arranged so mendaciously and so covered in a cream of ressentiment (especially against The Media) that such truth as it may contain amounts to flavor bits in a dish of falsehood. Here’s the main reason you know he’s not playing it straight with you. Peters tells us a) he rode around for thirty miles; b) he was tagging along with a US military unit; he’s got a background in military intelligence; c) he didn’t see any of that civil war stuff while he was riding around with the troops; d) therefore, there’s no civil war, only a lot of wishful thinking by the Emm Ess Emm(TM) and, you know, folks like me.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view’s clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn’t give me the right skills.

And right away you know Peters is full of shit.

When I read this, my first impression was the memories of interminable hours spent sitting in a bunker on the perimeter, waiting to see if something was going to happen that night. Or hours spent hanging around the hooch, playing cards and BSing the night way. War is 24/7, but combat isn’t. Combat is those few desperate moments of terror as you learn the other guy’s got you cross-haired, and then training and instinct take over and you fight to survive. I don’t know about Ralph Peters’ alleged military and intelligence background, but I do know that any trained intelligence operative knows what he sees is merely a snapshot of the moment and even then is subject to interpretation. I also know he’s handing off some pretty fragrant fertilizer in his column. Riding 25 or 30 miles through Iraq in a military convoy and not seeing any fighting? An absence of attack does not invalidate the idea of danger. That’s like saying you rode along I-95 for 30 miles and didn’t see any traffic accidents, therefore there are no accidents on I-95.

Iraq may or may not be slipping, or have already slipped, into something worthy of the name “civil war.” But a career soldier like Ralph Peters knows the truth of the old saw that war is interminable periods of boredom punctuated by sheer terror. A trained intelligence officer knows that what one sees with one’s own eyes on a single thirty mile jaunt (not thirty miles away from downtown and back, just thirty total drive miles in a day) in a country the size of California doesn’t begin to tell the story. He knows that wars have lulls and shocks, crescendoes and diminuendos.

He apparently doesn’t know that “The top commander of the Iraqi army division in Baghdad was killed Monday when his car came under small-arms fire while traveling through the capital, the U.S. military said.” The perils of writing on deadline. Perhaps tomorrow Peters will drive by the very spot and Thursday’s column will be about how he certainly didn’t see any Iraqi generals being killed. Unless by some coincidence he does, in which case he’ll start muttering darkly about how the press might get blamed for losing the war we were just winning on Monday.

(If an Iraqi general dies and there’s no warhawk around to see it, does he make a mess?)

Maybe that Iraqi general is related to the now seriously dead or captured al_Quaida #2 who’s so careless he keeps getting killed or captured every time CENTCOM needs some good news to report.

Meanwhile Peters attacks the courage of Baghdad’s Western reporters, even though the one thing Peters doesn’t describe himself doing is going anywhere at all without a US military escort. He impugns the honor of the local Iraqi journalists - they’ve got “agendas” at worst; they’re cynics at best - while he himself is transparently there to see what the US military wants him to see. I don’t begrudge Peters his friendships, nostalgias and institutional loyalties, but they are not to be confused with analytical clarity. A minor note: Peters says his patrol took him through Baghdad’s “less desirable boroughs,” but he also says he was in the Southeastern portion of the city. Zeyad’s map of last week’s violence suggests that you could carve out a sizable chunk of Southeastern Baghdad and have just about the calmest area of the city.

We’re going to see a great deal of this sort of attacking of US journalists as the reason Iraq was lost. Ralph Peters writes for the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert “green card” Murdoch, who is a wholly owned subsidiary of Republican Political Party, LLC.