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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
Our government continues to insist that imminent magic will make President Hamid Karzai reform and make his Afghan government perform.
Ain’t gonna happen. The better diplomats and generals know it. But they continue to play along — because we don’t have Plan B and never did.
We’re married to an abusive spouse and keep going back for more. We give Karzai lavish presents (an entire country), but he just keeps demanding more — while cheating on us. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button.
Until yesterday’s formal announcement of the administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn’t prevent all wars — but wars remained local.
Yesterday, we threw away a significant part of history’s most successful deterrent. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Roger Aronoff – [producer, media analyst]
Assuming that he is serious, however, one can take a look at the home page of MSNBC-TV and find that it shows 10 white faces and no people of color.
Stung by the reaction to his baseless charges of racism against the Tea Party movement, MSNBC-TV host Keith Olbermann did something he rarely does-he cited on the air some of the criticism of his remarks, including from my column carried by http://www.aim.org, GOPUSA and other Internet sites. He did this without labeling his critics as being among “the worst” people in the world. But he fell far short of coming clean about why he launched his smears. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
It’s been an embarrassing week for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, prime minis ter and de facto czar.
On Monday, Islamist suicide bombers struck just a rifle shot from the Kremlin.
The worst of the two subway bombings rubbed ex-KGB man Putin’s nose in it by slaughtering dozens in the Lyubanka station — named for the notorious security-service headquarters upstairs.
And the day after the two blasts killed 39 (with twice that many hospitalized), Islamist terrorists renewed their bombing campaign in Russia’s Muslim republic of Daghestan, next to battered (Muslim) Chechnya. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
As an intelligence officer or journalist, you’ve got to know which sources you can trust. And a source who’s never let me down told me yesterday that the terrorist multinational based in Pakistan is coming apart.
According to this insider’s insider, the Pakistan-headquartered Afghan Taliban is furious at the Taliban’s Pakistani wing because its assaults on the Islamabad government triggered a stunning backlash.
Unleashed at last, Pakistan’s military launched a series of offensives aimed at smacking down the domestic Taliban. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Marc T. Newman [critic]
Romance, Tragedy, and Responding to the Gifting of God
Romantic tragedy continues to be a strong draw at the bookstore and the box office. Nicholas Sparks, author of numerous best-sellers, including The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Dear John, and his latest The Last Song, is one of the top writers in this genre. On a sunny afternoon in Santa Monica, Sparks and I sat down to talk about his first screenplay for The Last Song (in theaters March 31), his thoughts about writing from a Christian perspective, and how Christians should respond to God’s call to the arts. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, was the worst day for US diplomacy in recent memory.
Between sunrise and sunset, we 1) handled our Israeli allies as enemies, 2) treated Pakistani gangsters as our benefactors and 3) got blindsided — brilliantly — by the Russians.
First, the Russians: Well aware that President Obama desperately wants to hold in his hand a piece of paper guaranteeing nuclear arms cuts in our time, Moscow has been stalling and brawling to force us to bend to its will. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
It’s wretched enough that our “friend” Ahmed Chalabi has become Iran’s point man in Iraq. Now “our man in Kabul,” President Hamid Karzai, is quietly shifting his loyalty to Tehran.
Beyond Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad’s recent chummy visit to Karzai — reported by the media but downplayed by Washington — Iran’s been training Taliban forces to kill our troops more efficiently.
Karzai hasn’t complained. Nor has he objected to Tehran’s expansion of its support for its clients in western Afghanistan. He wants that support for himself. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
If the Obama administration continues to betray Israel, will any ally ever trust us again?
We’ve been viewed as a fickle (if mighty) partner at least since the 1970s, when we abruptly dumped allies from Saigon to Tehran. Now the White House not only delights in insulting our closest traditional ally, Britain, but has intensified its diplomatic pogrom against Israel — our only respectable ally in the Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »
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by Ralph Peters [author, novelist]
The war is here. In our front yard. 18,000 dead in five years. With the casualty count worsening. And our attention is half a world away.
In the wake of a Saturday night party in Juarez, Mexico — across the Rio Grande from El Paso — two American citizens affiliated with the US consulate were gunned down in a narco-terror hit. Read the rest of this entry »
