Ralph Peters on Dreams & Islam

[Rob Thornton]

Fixed for copyright concerns. The full article can be found here.

This is a really interesting article as Rob points out.

Dream Warriors: Our Enemies Fight for Fantasies, not Freedom


by Ralph Peters

“Dreams have a vise-like grip on the people of Islam. We never grasped that it was more useful to let our Muslims dream than to build them schools, hospitals, and factories.”

“You’re confusing dreams with hope, aren’t you?” asked Donadieu.

“Possibly. But I sense that the dream is vaster and more mysterious than hope.”

— Jean Larteguy, Les Praetorians, 1961

In his best-selling novel about the French botch-up in Algeria, the former soldier and daring journalist, Jean Larteguy, prefigured many of the problems that English-speaking nations face today in the Middle East. While there are profound differences between Algeria and Iraq, not least the fact that Iraq has not been settled by over a million American colonists and that today’s Muslim warriors are waging reactionary, not revolutionary, warfare, many of the ruminations of the officers facing Arab militants in The Praetorians are uncannily familiar to those of U.S. Army and Marine officers today.

The most-telling insight in the novel lies in the exchange above (amended from the clunky translation published forty-five years ago): The French have been focusing on statistics and infrastructure — and losing. A veteran officer who’s gotten to know the indigenous Algerians recognizes the futility of applying European analytical models to Arabs, but the vast bureaucratic machines of the army and the state plod on, obsessed by their own internal issues and rivalries.

With our armor-plated prejudice in favor of empiricism (“Just the facts, ma’am!”), we’re blind to our own irrationality and susceptibility to delusions. Faced with combatively non-empirical cultures, such as those of the Middle East and North Africa, we’re baffled: How can our opponents continue to deny proven facts? Our stock response is to insist, yet again, that Arabs, Persians, Afghans, and Pakistanis really want the same things we want, but haven’t realized it yet and need to be convinced.

Yet, it’s our approach to life, although stunningly successful in other spheres, that’s out of step with history and humankind when it comes to sorting out the causes for which men (and women) will fight and die — even pursuing death with fanatic enthusiasm. The glimpses we can’t avoid of the mentality of other cultures are so disconcerting to us that, just as Arabs default to blaming the West for all of their ills, we default to our dogmatic insistence that the historical evidence that men fight hardest for God, bloodlines, and collective dreams is wrong and that extremist insurgents, terrorists, and suicide bombers are really fighting because they don’t have high-speed internet access.

Until we are willing to confront the mentality — the soul — of our enemies honestly, we can’t and won’t defeat them.