[Discussion] "The Shah Always Falls"

[Paksoy, Hb]

"The Shah Always Falls"
AMERICAN HERITAGE
February/March 2003       Volume 54, Number 1 
 
A soldier-historian looks at how the world has changed in the past decade
and finds that America is both hostage to history and likely to be saved by
it


An Interview With Ralph Peters by Fredric Smoler

Military historians sometimes write biographies of people they call military
intellectuals. Such people are interesting because they can have a vast
effect on history, and also because they combine in one career two modes of
life normally considered incompatible, the life of thought and the life of
action.

Lt. Col., Ret., Ralph Peters is a military intellectual, and his career
makes surprising reading. He enlisted in the Army as a private in 1976 and
served in a mechanized infantry division. He was commissioned in 1980 as a
second lieutenant in military intelligence and rose to the rank of
lieutenant colonel by 1998. Along the way he took a master's degree in
international relations and published eight novels, typing out the first one
while still a sergeant stationed in Germany. He also published a remarkable
series of essays, many of which first appeared in Parameters, the
theoretical journal of the U.S. Army War College. These essays are some of
the most radical writing I have ever read on the recent revolution in
military affairs. They began appearing at the start of the last decade, they
are beautifully written and intellectually exciting, and they have proved
startlingly (and sometimes grimly) prescient. 

 
Ralph Peters
 
This prodigious intellectual and literary output began while he was pursuing
a dramatic and varied set of military careers. Some of his assignments
informed his novels: Red Army, a cult classic within the Army before the
fall of the Soviet Union, describes a successful Soviet breakthrough on
NATO's central front and was inspired by a stint as chief intelligence
analyst for the 1st Armored Division, as well as by a job as the chief of
the Intelligence Production Section for III Corps. Other books grew out of
assignments in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. Some are set
in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, in its successor states, and in Central
Asia, all places where Peters has spent a great deal of time. These novels
share a theme with many of his essays on strategy and international
relations, the idea that a world ended between 1989 and 1991. Our new
situation is chaotic, its politics were generally unforeseen, it is
extremely dangerous, and in many ways it is extremely sad. However, the
United States faces its new threats with historically unparalleled
strengths. Over the course of his career, Peters served in or visited more
than 50 countries, on every continent save Antarctica, and the experience
has made him a patriot and an optimist.

In 1999 Peters retired from the Army to write full-time, and soon produced,
beginning with Faded Coat of Blue, a series of highly acclaimed Civil War
novels under the pen name Owen Parry. I interviewed Lieutenant Colonel
Peters in his house in northern Virginia, surrounded by Russian and German
books-he is at least trilingual-and a wonderful collection of contemporary
Russian paintings. We spoke about his essays, two volumes of which have been
collected and published-Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World and
Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?-and about what history, both
recent and ancient, tells us of the challenges and possibilities America
faces around the globe.


You've suggested that maintaining stability should rarely, if ever, be the
goal of American foreign policy. This is, to say the least, out of keeping
with what most of our strategic thinkers believe.
There are certainly times when we desire stability in international
politics, but in the underdeveloped world an obsession with stability means
preserving failure and worse. Overvaluing stability is a heritage of the
Cold War, over the course of which we rationalized our support of some very
cruel regimes and we deposed elected governments we didn't like. You could
justify it in terms of the greater struggle. But you can't justify it now.

What I wrote was that the shah always falls in the end, Saddam always turns
on you, and the Saudis always betray you. If we support evil, the long-term
price is almost always too high. And now we don't have to. Since 1989, or
'91, depending on how you want to date it, we've been the only superpower.
We haven't thought about what we've been doing. 


Am I hearing echoes of Woodrow Wilson?
Well, if you look at the 1990s, America has been defending the legacy of
czars, emperors, kaisers, and kings. It's ludicrous. The greatest democracy
in history defends borders drawn by European imperialists in Berlin in 1884
and 1885 or at Versailles-and for that matter, some drawn at the Congress of
Vienna in 1815. When we say that borders are inviolable, that we always
respect sovereignty, we pretend that somehow humanity has achieved this
magical state where existing borders are perfect. Well, they're not perfect.
For example, mightn't it be better if there were border changes in
Afghanistan, if its northern and western territories became part of a
marginally greater Uzbekistan and Iran? These territories weren't always
Afghan. I'm not saying such changes would be for the better. I'm saying at
least think about these options. In Washington, D.C., and the State
Department especially, we won't even think about them. It's sheer inertia.

I'd like to see us go back to where it is possible, within the realistic
limitations of geostrategy, to support plebiscites so that people can agree
on whom they want to live with or who should be their leader. I would like
to see us on the side of human rights. We talk about human rights very
selectively. We beat up on Burma because we don't have any trade with it,
but Saudi Arabia's abuses of human rights have been vastly worse, and we
don't say boo. Sometimes in the short term, as with Turkey, which is our big
aircraft carrier in the Middle East, we have to go softly, but even with
Turkey we could talk tougher behind the scenes. Human rights should always
be one of the pillars of our foreign policy. I want America to be on the
side of the downtrodden, the huddled masses, the tired and the poor. Why
not? 


You've argued that it's been the business of the United States to destroy
empires, that the United States has been the greatest of the
anti-imperialist powers.
European imperialism is still hard to assess with a cold eye. We're too
close to it. When we look at the question in a few centuries, I suspect
we'll decide that the imperial powers did some good things, a lot of bad
things, and many indifferent things. But in our time they've long since
outlived their usefulness. They probably started to do so by the eighteenth
century, certainly by the nineteenth and absolutely by the twentieth. The
United States seems almost like an organic response to the problem of
empire. If you look at our wars, even before we were a nation-for example,
the series of conflicts leading up to the French and Indian War-we were
fighting empires while being a part of one. We were under British suzerainty
fighting against the French Empire.

 
Instrument of empire: the Olympia, Dewey's flagship, now berthed in
Philadelphia.
 
The clash of civilizations is a great thesis, but it does not describe a new
phenomenon. The history of the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century
b.c. is the clash of civilizations, and so are the imperial wars of the
eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the French and Indian War is
crucial, and the colonial militia is decisive. On the Plains of Abraham, we
prove that modern empires can fall. We show that it's possible. Well, we
fight the greatest empire of that age, the British Empire, twice, once to
kick it out, and once to confirm it's got to stay out. Our next war is
against the Mexican Empire. The first phase of our struggle against empires
climaxes with the Civil War, when we destroy the imperial legacies of human
bondage and a landed aristocracy. That first phase ends with Seward's
purchase of Alaska, and it roughly defines American territory as we know it,
except for Hawaii.


"Nowadays we underestimate the Spanish-American War, because we assume that
important wars are bloody. This one wasn't bloody, but it was the first time
a non-European power destroyed a European empire." 
What's the second phase?
In 1898 phase two kicks in, and America starts looking outward. Nowadays we
underestimate the Spanish-American War because we assume that important wars
are bloody. This one wasn't bloody, but it was the first time a non-European
power destroyed a European empire. The Spanish Empire was decrepit, archaic,
and bankrupt, but it was an empire, and we reached out and broke it, and we
began becoming a new form of empire in the process. The Japanese saw that
the Europeans didn't all gang up on the Americans for destroying a European
empire, so a half-dozen years later they took on the other decrepit empire
in the Far East, the empire of the czars, and destroyed part of it. In the
First World War we were fighting alongside empires but also against them,
and we destroyed the decrepit Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and the
upstart Second Reich. In the Second World War we destroyed the Italian
empire, the Japanese empire, and the German Third Reich. By the end of the
Cold War we'd destroyed the last great surviving European empire, the Soviet
incarnation of the Russian Empire of the czars, and in some respects become
an empire ourselves, although a new kind. 

This process was layered and complex. In Indochina we were an anti-imperial
power fighting imperial wars against anti-imperialists backed by imperial
powers. Communism was an imperial force, the last great wave of European
imperialism. But at the same time, the Vietnamese and Cambodians were
fighting their own anti-imperial struggle against us. By the nineties we'd
directly or indirectly been involved in the destruction of almost every
European empire. Even the Dutch in Indonesia had to leave back in 1949
because America basically said, "You've got to go home." The Belgians pretty
much withered on their own. The Portuguese mostly withered on their own too,
but sad to say, we apparently gave Indonesia a green light to kick them out
of East Timor, which we came to regret less than a quarter of a century
later. Finally, in the course of restructuring empires we've gotten a legacy
of behaving like a new sort of imperial power. I want us to continue to be
this new sort of enlightened imperial power. It's the moral, right, and wise
thing to do.


Is the Chinese empire the last one that you think America will destroy?
I don't see China as an empire. It's got some imperial possessions, but it's
not an empire in the European sense. I think the greatest threat to the
Chinese is internal fissuring. There might be a period of warring states.
There have been such periods throughout Chinese history. Whether we'll see a
division between the rich east coast and the poor interior, whether we will
see a Chinese democracy or a renewal of dictatorship, perhaps of a grotesque
and monstrous form, nobody knows. China is the great wild card for the
twenty-first century. It's important that we avoid the American arrogance of
imagining we can have a decisive effect on a power like China. We're not
even going to have a decisive effect on Indonesia, but if we engage there,
we can make a difference. With China, we're playing on the margins. Patience
is the one great virtue Americans lack. It's true in our personal lives,
it's true in our consumer habits, and it's certainly true in geostrategy.


We lack patience, but you believe Americans have virtues that increase our
edge against possible competitors. What are they?
I believe that perhaps our greatest advantage is a tradition that grew up
over centuries, that we inherited from England. This is our tradition of
openness to new information, of respect for empirical data, and of
resistance to theoretical constructs other than those generated within the
scientific community. Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe
in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a
fantasy land. They do not have our ingrained, hard-learned ability to
separate fact from fiction. We have our myths, but we're not paralyzed by
them, and we question them. There are many ways you can divide the world,
but I think one of the more useful ways is between factualizing societies
and mythologizing societies. Listen to our enemies' rhetoric. They're in
love with their myths of themselves, both old myths and relatively recent
ones, and they're myths of self-justification. 

"Today America operates on a wartime basis every single day in terms of our
utilization of human capital. Rosie the Riveter is in the boardroom, she's
on campus, she's flying jets off carriers." 
The other crucial American advantage is the fact that over the past 150
years American women have fought their way into the workplace and the
educational system. This means that today America operates on a wartime
basis every single day in terms of our utilization of human capital. Rosie
the Riveter is in the boardroom, she's on campus, she's flying jets off
carriers. The numbers aren't hard to understand. This is grade-school math.
Because of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because of Susan B. Anthony-and the
Pankhursts in England-the American economy is booming. Greenspan's done a
good job, but it was really the feminists who put us over the top.

Look at our tremendous openness to the utilization of human capital, the
multiple revolutions that have occurred in our lifetimes and are still
developing, the opening of our society to women, to minorities, to old
people. Traditionally the role of old people in societies has been to
consume resources, mind the kids, and die. Yes, they're romanticized as
imparting wisdom, but in fact they're drooling in the soup. In America today
they're healthier and they're active. My father-in-law is one of my heroes.
A former marine, a Korean War vet, a workingman, he worked hard all his
life, built a good life for himself and his family. His wife worked too. Now
he's formally retired, but he works with Habitat for Humanity, he drives a
volunteer ambulance, and he still works part-time for his company when it
needs him. He's about 70 and still contributing. This is happening at a time
when in Europe if you lose your job at age 50, you're probably not going to
get another one.


Of course we're pretty much focused on the Islamic world now. What does
history suggest about how things will play out there?
Having gone out and seen much of the world-more than 50 countries-I find it
clear that some cultures are better structured than others for success in
the postmodern world. I'm most pessimistic about the Arab heartlands of
Islam. I think the Indonesians have a fighting chance. Persia may surprise
us all and turn out to be the first modern market economy and democracy in
that part of the world. The average Iranian desperately wants to re-embrace
the West and America in particular. So I'm hopeful about Iran-Persian
civilization is amazingly robust-and I'm hopeful about Turkey. 

In countries where there's a struggle going on for the soul and future of
Islam, the jury's still out. I'm actually increasingly optimistic. But I do
believe the last couple of centuries demonstrate that cultures that oppress
women, that don't have freedom of information, that don't value secular
education, that have one dominant religion that infects the state and has
power over the state, and whose basic unit of social organization is a clan,
tribe, or extended family are just not going to compete with the West and
especially with the United States. So I'm extremely pessimistic about the
old Islamic heartland. 

I personally feel that we've made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves
with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world's Beverly
Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis
never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a
disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these
malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic
states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that's absolutely true is
that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi
money, spent to support their grotesquely repressive version of one of the
world's great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world. 


What do you see as the historical origins of our strength?
Freedom of information originates in two things, the movable type printing
press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter benefits everybody,
irrespective of his or her religion, because it breaks down the idea of
there being just one path to the truth. The printing press makes the
Reformation possible, because suddenly the one true church can no longer
contain heretical movements. Information travels faster than it can be
suppressed. And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise
of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the
secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in
the one path to the truth, you can't have science.

"Within 10 years of Gutenberg's invention of movable type, a prince,
astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulugh Beg of Samarqand, built a great
observatory. He's a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and
I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying." 
In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg's
invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet,
Ulugh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their
Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point
at which it all started calcifying. There are myriad factors in the Islamic
decline, but the decline itself has been irreversible. Muslims never turn it
around; they never have their reformation that breaks down the one true
path. You're either Sunni or Shiah, or perhaps a Sufi offshoot cult. And the
reason Indonesia has a chance is that it's never signed up for one path. 


You've argued that nineteenth-century concepts of international relations
may be outmoded. In fact, aren't you pretty skeptical about national
sovereignty, international organizations, and international law? 
The idea of absolute state sovereignty is relatively new, and it derives
from agreements among kings, emperors, kaisers, and czars for their mutual
benefit. What we're left with from the state making of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe is a legacy that tells us we cannot intervene in
states as they slaughter their own citizens because they're sovereign. By
that logic, Hitler would have been perfectly legitimate as long as he killed
only German Jews. It's patently flawed logic. Any state that benefits only a
dictatorship, oligarchy, or clique, that oppresses, brutalizes, and even
massacres elements of its own citizenry, has no legitimate claim on
sovereignty-period. Sovereignty is fine for contemporary Japan, the European
states, or, for that matter, India. Mexico is now coming along and trying
very hard. But states like Iraq, Milosevi´c's Yugoslavia, and a number of
African thugocracies have no legitimate claim on sovereignty.


This is part of your pushing for a revolution in American military ethics.
One of your most controversial points is that it is wrong for us to refuse
to assassinate the leaders of enemy forces.
Yes, we have a prohibition against assassination. We tend to trace it to CIA
excesses, but it's an older tradition, and it again goes back to the mutual
agreements of kings not to hurt one another: "We're in a fight, and we'll
take Burgundy, we'll take Flanders, but we're not going to depose you, we're
not going to kill you, because then you might kill us." It was a gentleman's
agreement. Today it should be obvious that if the problem is Saddam, the
solution isn't targeting the Iraqi people, who are suffering far worse than
we are. The solution is targeting Saddam and his clique. Again, you have the
limits of inherited language. Assassination is a loaded word, and we don't
have a better one. What we're starting to have is the technology to leap
over intervening armies and go after the sponsors. Wouldn't that be far more
moral than plowing our way through the conscripts who don't want to be there
in the first place? 


Ten years ago you were far more skeptical about U.S. military intervention
in the developing world. Why the change of heart?
I was wrong, and I learned. The key experience was my peripheral-very
peripheral-involvement in the first Balkan crisis, in 1992. Yugoslavia was
initially a small cancer, but we let it metastasize. At the time, the
American armed forces were shrinking. We had a very small military for our
global responsibilities. The Europeans were bragging that they didn't need
the United States any more; the Soviet Union was gone, and they could do it
themselves. And I thought, great, let the French and the Germans and the
Brits do the Balkans. They certainly have the manpower and the money. I
still think Europe had the power to do it, but I deluded myself about its
will. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that the only hope for avoiding
the bloodbath was early and decisive U.S. involvement. I will always be
ashamed that I took the Europeans at their word and that I raised my minor
voice against the intervention in Yugoslavia back in 1992. 

After Vietnam, where the leadership left it hanging out to dry, our military
has been extremely wary of intervention. But there are times when we are our
brother's keeper. We know when the human rights violations are intolerable,
when genocide is going on. There are times when you must go, times when the
price is right and you should go, and other times when it's impossible, when
you're foolish to go. But you need a granular understanding, a tactile feel
for foreign cultures, to be able to judge objectively and wisely. That's why
we need better intelligence. You can't intervene everywhere. You have to
choose the ones that are doable. 

Somalia was a mistake, for instance. It was one of those cases where we
needed to get food in and then leave. Mission creep is often used as an
excuse for not doing something, but in Somalia, where we stayed too long and
tried to do too much, mission creep was a valid complaint. 

We got into the middle of clan fights that were all about food and power and
tribal turf, and because we couldn't stop them, we shouldn't have tried to.
We had a Mr. Micawber foreign policy, hoping something would turn up, hoping
they'd see the light and there'd be a magic solution. There are never magic
solutions in devastated, war-torn states. After the Battle of Mogadishu,
which we won overwhelmingly, we made things worse by cutting and running.
The failure of nerve of the Clinton administration encouraged our enemies to
believe that whenever you kill a few Americans, they'll run away. Osama bin
Laden talked a lot about Somalia. 


But you've argued that American military dominance in conventional warfare
is about to become overwhelming, that nobody will fight us on our terms. So
won't the future mostly be Somalias?
Any dictator or regime happy to take on the U.S. military in conventional
war is an idiot, but there are always idiots. Wiser enemies will take an
asymmetrical tack. The operation on September 11, detestable though it was,
was brilliantly executed: complex, well imagined, and amazingly well
conducted. They did seriously underestimate our strength and our response,
so the lesson all around is never to underestimate your opponents. This
lesson is broadly applicable. Radical regimes or nonstate entities can take
imaginative, incisive, asymmetrical approaches, but we also have to worry
about opposing major powers. It's not even constructive to name names. 


You've pointed to nasty consequences of the comparative success of America,
suggesting that this new century may be quite a dark one because of it.
Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional
release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is
humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the
opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture,
who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at
our enormous success with inchoate envy.

Ten years ago, when I tried to talk about the role of religious belief and
the power of religion, it was not considered a serious strategic factor.
People talked about economics and demographics, about political structures
and development theory. Since September 11, people are perfectly happy to
talk about religion. In the future we'll get around to recognizing the
neuroses, if not psychoses, that are far too prevalent within the Arabian
heartland of the Islamic world. I believe that a primeval terror of female
sexuality is a significant strategic factor, one we've failed to examine.
Males in these traditional cultures see the pictures of Pamela Anderson or
replay Sharon Stone movies, and they want a piece of the action. But they
don't want their daughters and wives to turn into Pamela Anderson, or
Britney Spears, or, for that matter, Emmylou Harris. They're mesmerized by
the sexual component in our culture, which our media grossly exaggerate and
which they misread. 

They don't understand that most Americans lead surprisingly moral lives,
that we work, we go to church, and we're not constantly lascivious. We have
a good time when we're in college and when we're young; then we mostly get
it out of our systems. But that doesn't work in a culture that sees female
virginity as the ultimate good to be traded to your familial or clan
advantage. We've outgrown that view, although it took us a long time. In the
West the great revolution of the twentieth century was the birth control
pill. The transition from women as property to women as full participants in
society has been the greatest revolution in human history, and its
reverberations will be felt for centuries. Repressive cultures are horrified
by it because it calls into question their most fundamental biological,
sociological, and religious ideas. However, the oppression of women anywhere
is not only a human rights violation, it's a suicide pact with the future. 


You've written that the inability to imagine that American wealth actually
came from work is another reason our enemies can't understand us.
I'm a great believer in America and the American dream, but in my case it
took about five generations. I'm descended from coal miners on both sides.
Before me, my people coughed up their lungs, went hungry during strikes, and
lived in company houses with 12 to 15 people in two tiny bedrooms until
tuberculosis reduced the body count. So it took America a long time. We
worked long and hard, and we suffered and struggled and fought our internal
battles and fell by the wayside and died in civil wars. The Gilded Age
wasn't very gilded for most Americans. People from developing countries see
only the wealth, not the long struggle to create that wealth, and they make
the comforting assumption that Americans are rich because they have stolen
it. 

"People from developing countries see only the wealth, not the long struggle
to create that wealth, and they make the comforting assumption that
Americans are rich because they have stolen it." 
I wish more people read old books, especially some of those that are now
allegedly discredited. Weber's Protestant ethic has been dismissed by
revisionists. Maybe we should partially rehabilitate it, because work ethics
matter, and not every culture has one. Another writer who's due for a bit of
rehabilitation is Sigmund Freud, because terror of female sexuality is a
real and crippling phenomenon. And William James. Read The Varieties of
Religious Experience, and you'll get closer to Al Qaeda than you will with
any of those instant books on Osama bin Laden. Another one is Norman Cohn's
The Pursuit of the Millennium. It's the best single volume in any language
on the roots of religious fanaticism. If you look at my strategic
writings-for want of a better term-they're clearly influenced by experience
and direct observation but also by reading. Any observation without reading
is almost as bad as reading without observation. When we think about the
evidence that's available for formulating American grand strategy in the
years to come, the study of history is most of what we've got.

Fredric Smoler's "Fighting the Last War-and the Next" appeared in the
November/December 2001 issue. Ralph Peters's essay "Who We Fight" ran last
September.

PHOTOGRAPHS: TOP, COURTESY OF RALPH PETERS; BOTTOM, PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION
AND VISITORS BUREAU