Post: #1

Source: http://nypost.com/2015/03/15/why-our-pre...-and-isis/

Quote:Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced with a man like Putin? Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators? Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph?

The answer is straightforward:

Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the world; our enemies know everyone else.

The mandarin’s distaste for physicality: We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody nose.
And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies know, firsthand, the stuff of life.

Above all, there is arrogance based upon privilege. For revolving-door leaders in the U.S. and Europe, if you didn’t go to the right prep school and elite university, you couldn’t possibly be capable of comprehending, let alone changing, the world. It’s the old social “Not our kind, dahhhling…” attitude transferred to government.

Dramatic, revolutionary change in geopolitics never comes from insiders. It’s the outsiders who change the world. In the 21st century, our government suffers from the sclerosis of insider thinking that constantly reinforces itself and rejects conflicting evidence. The result is that we are being whipped by savages.

That educational insularity is corrosive and potentially catastrophic: Our “best” universities prepare students to sustain the current system, instilling vague hopes of managing petty reforms. But dramatic, revolutionary change in geopolitics never comes from insiders. It’s the outsiders who change the world. In the 21st century, our government suffers from the sclerosis of insider thinking that constantly reinforces itself and rejects conflicting evidence. The result is that we are being whipped by savages.

Of course, the insiders can’t accept so abhorrent a prospect as their own fallibility. So when new blood does enter — through those same “elite” institutions — it’s channeled into the same old calcium-clogged arteries. And we get generals with Ivy League Ph.D.s writing military doctrine that adheres cringingly to politically correct truisms and leaves out the very factors, such as the power of religion or ethnic hatred, that prove decisive. Or a usually astute commentator on Eastern European affairs who dismisses Vladimir Putin as a mere chinovnik, a petty bureaucrat, since Putin was only a lieutenant colonel in the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and didn’t go to a Swiss prep school like John Kerry.

That analyst overlooked the fact that Hitler had been a mere lance corporal. Stalin was a failed seminarian. Lenin was a destitute syphilitic. Ho Chi Minh washed dishes in the basement of a Paris Hotel. And when the French Revolution erupted, Napoleon was a junior artillery officer.

And sophisticated Germans assumed they could use Hitler and then dismiss him, while other Europeans mocked him. Stalin’s fellow Bolsheviks underestimated him, until it was too late and their fates were sealed. The French didn’t notice Ho. And Napoleon shocked even his own lethargic family. The “man on horseback” is often the man from nowhere, and the members of the club ignore the torches in the streets until the club burns down around them.

Put another way: We are led by men and women educated to believe in the irresistible authority of their own words. When they encounter others who use words solely to deflect and defraud, or, worse, when their opposite numbers ignore words completely and revel in ferocious violence, our best and brightest go into an intellectual stall and keep repeating the same empty phrases (in increasingly tortured tones):

“Violence never solves anything.” “There’s no military solution.” “War is never the answer.” “Only a negotiated solution can resolve this crisis.” “It isn’t about religion.”

Or the latest and lamest: “We need to have strategic patience,” and “Terrorists need jobs.”

Every one of those statements is, demonstrably, nonsense most — or all — of the time. But the end result of very expensive educations is a Manchurian Candidate effect that kicks in whenever the core convictions of the old regime are questioned. So we find ourselves with leaders who would rather defend platitudes than defend their country.

And negotiations become the opium of the chattering classes.

Once-great universities have turned into political indoctrination centers worthy of the high Stalinist Era or the age of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Their aims may be more benign, but their unwillingness to consider alternative worldviews is every bit as rigid. Students in the social sciences at Harvard or Yale today are cadets being groomed to serve a soft-Socialist form of government conceived not in the streets, but in the very same classrooms. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone. And graduates leave campus brilliantly prepared for everything except reality.

This is not an argument against education. Rather, it is an argument for education and against indoctrination, against the fantasy that the barbarian with the knife bashing in the door poses no danger to the career government official who has published a book on “the false construct of race and its deleterious impact upon climate change.”

Putin, that “petty bureaucrat,” has won every significant confrontation with the West, conquering foreign territory and humiliating presidents. Iran’s negotiators have outmaneuvered their Western interlocutors so spectacularly that they really don’t need Obama’s deal, having gotten most of what they needed: time and partial sanctions relief. And the Islamic State has confounded not only our elite’s prejudices about how the world should work, but demolished their platitudinous nonsense that “All men want peace.”

In fact, some men delight in inflicting grotesque forms of violence on others.

We face a new age of barbarism. And we’re led by those whose notion of violence is a rugby game at Princeton, who won’t let their children play unattended but deny the murderous impulses haunting humanity. Perhaps it’s time to recognize that the lack of a prep-school background and a Brooks Brothers charge account doesn’t mean that a thug with slovenly manners can’t change the world.

I think there's definitely some truth here.

Disclaimer: It is important to keep in mind this was originally posted on FoxNews.com, favored network of chickhawks itching for a war with Iran

Post: #2

Every nation is responsible for its own despots. The French Revolution is an example of people having enough and killing their exploitive elite. History may need repeating.

Post: #3

It's by Ralph Peters, a lunatic retired Lt. Col in intelligence. Twenty-five years ago he was warning of the coming war with Japan. He was also a cheerleader for invading Iraq. Some intel analysis there, Ralph.

Since then, he's feeding at the neocon trough as a career propagandist. This is not-so subtle attack on the negotiations with Iran, as you suggest.

I don't know what he thinks the USA should have done against Hitler and Stalin, instead of what they did do.

There are very few prep school kids in the Foreign Service now. Most Foreign Service Officers are winners in the "meritocratic" schooling contest of the upper-middle class in America, but there are a lot of ex-military, ex-Peace Corps, and others with interesting backgrounds. I know former Marines, a former Army Ranger, a reserve colonel in Army Civil Affairs, and quite a few others with military service. Any American can take the Foreign Service exam. So Peters is full of shit there, with his "prep school" shit, but again a veiled propaganda attack on John Kerry, who was a prep school grad, and the negotiations with Iran.

If there is a fault in the foreign service, it's that years of being in diplomatic missions, trying to get attaboys from the Ambassador, competing over evaluations and assignments turns some people risk-adverse. Bureaucratic mentality sets in.

The coolest diplomats are pretty cool, though - they are swashbucklers who are fluent in several languages and love to get out an mix with foreigners. That goes for the Brits, too.

Post: #4

Never liked Ralph Peter's. He writes a column for a magazine I used to get called Armchair General. A Neocon if ever there was one. On this though, he speaks some truth.

I remember that when Putin was annexing Crimea everyone was saying, "this isn't the 17th or 18th century anymore, you can't do things like this." Putin was probably laughing his ass off at the talking heads.

These old fashioned tactics of gunboat diplomacy and territorial ambition are still effective. The world is ruled by only two things, guns, and money to put bullets in those guns. Everything else is superfluous.

Post: #5

I don't really know if it's "prep school diplomats." Most people in the Department of State who I know are middle class, and generally didn't go to the Ivy League. What Peters is stabbing at, though I don't think he really knows it himself, is the way the US conducts diplomacy. More or less, US foreign policy has been the same since Wilson, with Nixon as a possible exception. Now, what is that policy?

It's the idea that the US has to spread the liberal world order. Democracy, capitalism, secularism, etc. It's the idea that we clearly know better than anyone who doesn't have those things, and we have to bring them it. In some ways, it's the White Man's Burden 2.0. That foreign policy prerogative, spreading the liberal world order, is part of why we invaded Iraq in 2003. We're too "modern" and "progressive" to play geopolitics. The United States somehow believes itself above geopolitics. That's not a criticism of just Obama/Kerry/Hillary Clinton. It's a criticism of both parties, because the United States is completely beholden to that idea- that we're above geopolitics.

That's why Putin is able to outfox the US and most of the EU. Both believe themselves to be the bearers of the "liberal world order" standard. Putin couldn't give less of a fuck about the liberal world order. Putin plays geopolitics. So does Angela Merkel. Until the fundamental belief behind American foreign policy changes, Putin is going to continue kicking the US' ass on the diplomatic stage.

Post: #6

Ralph Peters is (or was) a Fox News militarist warmongering hack whose message was just to invade everyone: Russia, Iran, Mars, Pluto, the solar system.

Post: #7

(03-15-2015 07:12 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  Ralph Peters is (or was) a Fox News militarist warmongering hack whose message was just to invade everyone: Russia, Iran, Mars, Pluto, the solar system.

Post: #8

I don't necessarily think that the US is failing.

Ukraine seems to be have been effectively used to weaken Russia and drive a wedge between Russia/Europe.

On ISIS, here is what Wesley Clark said on television recently.





The only thing that I agree with him on is that the current education is indoctrination on some levels. The degree to how much indoctrination you receive varies quite a bit depending on which courses you take. Some courses are 100% educational, some are mostly educational with a bit of indoctrination and a few are mostly designed to indoctrinate those that take it.

Edit : The only failure I see is on the Public Relations front. For the first time in history we are seeing cracks in the monolith that American PR. Prior to recent history America had a virtual monopoly on PR. With the advent of the internet, this is being challenged. Which has hurt America's reputation around the world.

Post: #9

Ralph Peters comes across as a lunatic imperialist 90% of the time, but I find his observations on instability in certain regions of the world like the Middle East and Africa relating back to how those borders were the creation of Europeans completely ignorant of the local cultures pretty spot on.

Post: #10

The premise of the article is something that needs to be discussed more as it is an important issue, but the author is too consumed by his ideology to make a clear and objective argument. I enjoy listening to Colonel Peters rip Obama, but otherwise he's just a typical neocon. Reading his comments about Putin you can tell he is just itching to start a war with Russia.

I do agree with the point he's trying to make though. Think of it this way: Take your typical DC resident, and that's who you have running your government: Liberal, mangina, blue-pill etc. The type everyone here rails against. These people are taking over all branches of the USG:

State: I interned at an Embassy abroad. The foreign service has some of the nation's brightest individuals, but they are for the most part like your typical DC person. They don't have the balls to stand up to a despot or a group of terrorists, and instead use liberal logic like deputy spokesperson for State Marie Harf who said the solution to terrorism is "jobs". Right, that's why people blow themselves up and cut people's heads off in Mumbai and Nairobi. But that's another issue...

At the same time though, I don't think the State Department should adopt the neocon rhetoric of "Bombs away". There needs to be a happy medium where diplomats grow a pair, but still use diplomacy first and tread carefully.

Also, Obama is rampantly making "Political" appointees (I.e. campaign donors) ambassadors, over Career diplomats. The ambassador I worked under was incredibly bright and talented, if there were more men like him running embassies the world would be a better place.

Military: The two highest ranking members of the Air Force are Secretary Deborah Lee James, and Eric Fanning (Who was actually recently appointed Chief of Staff for DoD), a woman and gay man respectively. Neither of these individuals were ever in the military, and yet they are running the Air Force? Cmon now... Clearly these people are being appointed for "Diversity" reasons rather than merit.

Also, cadets are now spending hours and hours on diversity training and "how to not rape women" seminars while ISIS is teaching 8 year olds to behead people. PC, diversity and all that jazz takes preference over actually kicking ass.

Intelligence Bureaus: Same as State.

As for colleges, I agree with what he says. It is well known that universities, especially elite ones, have their biases that they pass on to their students. It's now taken over government for good. The consequences won't be good.

Post: #11

This is from the NY POST...for those not from NYC this paper is our tabloid newspaper, no one serious writes for this paper or reads it.


They gave Ashley Dupre ,the hooker who had sex with the old Governor, her own advice column.

Quote:Smart and sexy Ashley Dupre learned from scandal -- and she'll be your escort through the world of relationships as a Post columnist.


Sure, she’s made some mistakes. But now Ashley Dupre, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is sharing what she’s learned in her new sex, love and relationship column — exclusively in the New York Post. Is your husband cheating? Is your daughter on a dangerous path? Our readers asked — and Ashley fired back with her no-nonsense advice.

Post: #12

(03-15-2015 11:30 AM)DChambers Wrote:  Never liked Ralph Peter's. He writes a column for a magazine I used to get called Armchair General. A Neocon if ever there was one. On this though, he speaks some truth.

I remember that when Putin was annexing Crimea everyone was saying, "this isn't the 17th or 18th century anymore, you can't do things like this." Putin was probably laughing his ass off at the talking heads.

These old fashioned tactics of gunboat diplomacy and territorial ambition are still effective. The world is ruled by only two things, guns, and money to put bullets in those guns. Everything else is superfluous.

Which is funny, as these people clearly never heard of how India annexed Portuguese Goa in a more aggressive manner than Russia did Crimea in '61: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_annexation_of_Goa

Or Israel's de facto annexation and continued colonization of the West Bank and North Vietnam's annexation of the South(it was a sovereign state after all).

Post: #13

I know what he's trying to say but he's saying it poorly.

Many of the "elite" who are in charge tend to think that other world leaders are as corrupt and valueless as they are and couldn't possibly truly believe the things they say. It's a major reason why Khrushchev made JFK his bitch in their first meeting and why America gets duped time and again by foreign leaders who had to fight their way to the top. Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin's relationship was another example of this.

I'd count Kerry among those types. He was buddy-buddy with communist Sandinista Daniel Ortega.

Him and Tom Harkin were and still are treasonous trash.