American Idiot

On July 3rd, Private Bowe Bergdahl went missing from his unit in Afghanistan. He was soon shown on an Internet video, in Taliban custody. The Taliban had coerced him into making negative statements about the United States and the Afghanistan war, actions which are widely considered war crimes. On July 19th, former military intelligence officer Ralph Peters appeared on Fox News to make a fool of himself. He stated that it was his belief that Private Bergdahl was a deserter, and that as far as he was concerned the Taliban could "save us a lot of legal hassles," meaning they could kill him.
This is reprehensible, but given Peters' history of neo-conservatism and his fetish for American military power, not surprising. In a 1997 article titled Constant Conflict Peters wrote, "the de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing." In August 2006, he blamed the American's problems in Iraq on "the Arab genius for screwing things up." He was also against the troop surge, in October of '06, before he was for it, in August of '07. Then came the Bergdahl debacle. Three days later, he went on a conservative radio show to accuse Bergdahl of lying about having a girlfriend, saying that her never mentioned her name.
So here is an ideology that favors American military power above all. He believes that the slaughter of innocent foreigners is desirable if it increases the wealth of the United States and allows us to shove American culture down their throats with the barrel of a gun. He believes in American exceptionalism, in that our failures in Iraq must not be of our own doing, but clearly the fault of the nation that we decided to illegally occupy. Now, when the fate of an American soldier is in the balance, has he shown remorse or concern for a prisoner of war? No, he has questioned his loyalty and advocated his death. Ralph Peters doesn't care about the troops, only about American power and wealth. The troops are merely a tool to be used to this end. Peters is the embodiment of all that America's detractors claim it to be. Our strength does not lie in our military power or wealth, but in our ideals that are, or should be, the envy of the world. Only in preserving the ideals of justice, equality, and human rights can we be the shining city on a hill.