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Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace. By Ralph Peters. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Press, 2003. 337 pages. $22.95.
A pen in the hand of Ralph Peters, as regular readers of these pages can attest, becomes a harpoon. In his latest collection of articles, Beyond Baghdad, the lances that Peters hurls are worthy of the finest Nantucket whaler of yore.
Target number one is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and what Peters calls "his fawning train of courtiers." High-priority targets include Muslim terrorists, Saudi Arabia and other Arabs, liberals led by former President Bill Clinton, the French, the Germans, other Europeans, and airpower. Those who are spared the wrath of Peters, and indeed are objects of his affection, are soldiers, women, and Israelis.
Like all harpooners, Peters sometimes misses his mark. he admires China, overlooking Chinese genocide in Tibet, the suppression of Uighurs in the western province of Xinjiang, territorial claims through the South China Sea almost to the shores of Indonesia, border skirmishes with India, the 20 million who died in the Cultural Revolution, the massacre at Tienanmen, and the history of the Middle Kingdom as the would-be suzerain of Asia.
Peters also hurls shaft after shaft at the American press and television news, asserting that most correspondents "simply don't understand what they are seeing." he may or may not be right, but he fails to make his case. One thirsts for an authoritative quote, a hard fact, a few examples, some shred of evidence that a novice copy...