Citizen 'Jury Nillifications'

Frontpage talks with Ralph Peters:

FP: Your perspective on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going? What strategies that are in effect are wrong? What strategies would be more effective?

Peters: Strategy? We still don’t have a strategy for Afghanistan-Pakistan. We just have a collection of disjointed techniques we’re desperately trying to apply, hoping something, anything, will work. A troop surge is a tool, not a strategy. And you can’t nation-build where there’s no nation to build. I’m disheartened. American soldiers and Marines are dying and being maimed for fairy-tale counterinsurgency strategies that insist that digging wells for illiterate Afghans will deter al Qaeda’s Arab fanatics from killing Americans. The only wise and effective thing we’re doing is applying UAVs (drones) and our special operations forces to the indispensable task of killing terrorists.

I’ve never been threatened by a dead terrorist. And when a terrorist believes he’s on a mission from his god to kill you, killing him is the only plausible response.

As I’ve written recently, what little analysis of the Afghan problem we do obsesses on our continuing failures. But the real question, which we refuse to ask, is “Why are the Taliban successful?” And, of course, we go on pretending that Islam has nothing to do with anything. Political correctness is killing our troops, defeating us, and facilitating terror around the world.

FP: Potential threats in 2010? Where have we taken our eye off the ball?

Peters: Good Lord, where do you start? The usual suspects will still be with us: Iran, al Qaeda, Chinese subversion of our economy (brought to you by WalMart, among others, thanks), piracy, Hugo Chavez’s apparent determination to precipitate a border war with Colombia, the Kirchner regime’s attempt to hobble democracy in Argentina, Islamist aggression in Nigeria (which is intensifying again), and, above all, Mexico–where the narco-insurgency constitutes the real number-one threat to the welfare of our citizen. It bewilders me that we’re obsessed with “saving” Afghanistan, a worthless piece of dirt in the middle of nowhere, when the crucial struggle is right on (and crossing) our southern border. Mexico is the most important country in the world to us–for better and worse–and we treat it as problem number 47.

Where have we taken our eye off the ball? Please, tell me where the Obama administration has an eye on any foreign-policy or security balls. This ultra-left administration isn’t concerned with security (except to the extent that it impacts on politics), but with a hard-left, destructive and divisive vision of “social justice.” Which means, of course, punish productive citizens to reward the Lumpenproletariat. We’re a greater threat to ourselves, in the long run, than al-Qaeda is to us.

Some questions- if the Detroit bomber is just a criminal, what did he expect to gain from his crime, free airline miles? Better food?

Presently, ordinary citizens are constrained from shooting, torching, tarring & feathering, spray painting etc. at the enemies within because the police rightly must pursue such acts as crimes. When, how or what will create the equivalent conditions where they behave lie the jury who refuses to convict? When the police say, "Well, as far as we're concerned, he just slipped on a bar of soap"?