Fighting for Faith
Stopped in at Borders for my weekly fix and came across Ralph Peters’ latest anthology. (Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts that Will Shape the Twenty-First Century, Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007, 367 pgs, $27.95) While I am pretty familiar with Ralph’s worldview and his extensive writings in the Armed Forces Journal, this one appeared to include a lot of his material that I had not seen. A few hours of reading confirmed my suspicion, and I wanted to let the readership know that this may top the cake for a brutal dose of reality and nonpolitically correct reporting from around the globe.
For those tired of the mainstream media’s twisted presentation of facts and generally warped reasoning, pick up Ralph Peters’ latest book. Anytime you are frustrated by the banal posturing of government officials and want straight-forward thinking, take a close look at Wars of Blood and Faith. It is a coherent assessment of today’s most pressing threats and opportunities from Africa to India to the Middle East. So if you’re a student of strategic affairs, a policy official enshrouded with the official view and want to break out of the blinkered pap you get from the party line, or simply an American citizen who wants to find insightful and at times brutally frank perspectives on current challenges, you don’t need not to look any further. Ralph Peters and Wars of Blood and Faith provide the most penetrating assessment of what could be called the age of identity-based conflict.
I know I don’t need to puff up the author’s reputation, which was well established by his two decades of service to the Nation as an Army intelligence officer. His longstanding credentials as a fearless, perceptive, and accurate analyst are hard to beat. With more than 20 books to his credit, he somehow keeps up a prolific volume of quality material. In this anthology, Ralph extends his reputation even further as a writer. The opening section on the 21st century military begins with a biting essay titled “The Shape of Wars to Come.” It’s a searing intro to this era’s religious-based violence, an era that will generate an “an unprecedented expansion in the varieties of organized violence.”
Peters has lots to say about the new counterinsurgency manual. Some of this we have already hashed out on the journal’s pages, but I think the discussion on the influence of religion on modern irregular warfare remains in play. I know some people have impressions from their exposure to current operations, and my own research is inconclusive, but there is something to this issue that bears detailed scrutiny. To Peters, we have exited a brief aberration of conflict and reentered a much longer era of fundamental struggles over God and blood. Now that the brief age of ideology is over, he thinks we are returning to the recurring tides of human history existence in which wars were fought over blood and belief, not over political systems or resource distribution. This is a profound distinction, and one that many politicians, officers and civilian experts cannot seem to fathom. “No matter how vociferously we deny it,” Ralph notes, “our wars will be fought over religion and ethnic identity.” The author leaves the reader with little doubt that those wars will be brutally savage and protracted.
For Peters, conflict over primitive faith and blood loyalties should induce alternations to the Maoist era counterinsurgency doctrine. The prescriptions in FM 3-24 claimed to have understood that today’s era was different and clearly attempted to come to grips with the complexities of insurgents fueled by religious hatred and primal loyalties. Peters argues, persuasively to this reviewer, that violence stemming from the confessional or ethnic identity is profoundly different and not easily rectified or solved by our historically grounded counterinsurgency theory of the past half century. In the midst of violent struggles between intolerant religious factions and age-old ethnic rivals, Peters finds the new manual replete with outdated remedies. LtCol Peters emphasizes, “A Maoist in Malaya could be converted. But Islamist terrorists who regard death as a promotion are not going to reject their faith any more than an ethnic warrior can—or would wish to– change his blood identity.”
With regard to new insights on COIN theory, the influence of religion and conflict, I would also encourage readers to closely review Dr. Steve Metz’s superlative new monograph, titled Rethinking Counterinsurgency, which is available on line at the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. I would also encourage readers to review the longitudinal data compiled and analyzed by Harvard’s Dr. Monica Duffy Toft in the recent issue of International Security. Her essay, titled “Getting Religion?: The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War” (International Security, Spring 2007, pp. 97-131) amplifies on research I had cited in my earlier postings on this topic, and her conclusions (based off of 42 civil wars over a 60 year period) are that religious conflicts are more destructive, harder to stem, are four times as deadly, and last twice as long. Her analysis suggests that there are numerous contextual explanations, aside from pure spiritually motivated zeal and savagery.
Ongoing operations in Iraq may provide another data point on this issue. When we can step back and view the data critically and objectively, I hope we can produce some clearer conclusions. For now, I will abide with Wars of Blood and Faith. It is a stunning collection of provocative writing on current and future national security challenges and cuts to the chase on so many complicated issues.
LtCol Hoffman is a Research Fellow employed by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, and is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia, PA.
