Murdering Journalists

This had slipped my mind, until I finally found it skulking in one of my Google Reader folders. Ralph Peters:

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies.

As far as I can tell, Peters is calling for the murder of journalists he doesn’t like. David Axe has an appropriate set of responses:

• Journalists are not a protected species: attacks on reporters in war zones have increased in recent years
• If our nation’s causes are just, the establishment has nothing to hide, from the public, the press or anyone
• Reporting does not kill U.S. soldiers, but the absence of a coherent, public strategy does
• Openness, including press freedom, is one of the very “globalizing” forces America and her allies fight for
• “We” doesn’t means what it used to: today the U.S. almost never acts truly unilaterally, for we are part of a vast, complex and shifting international system, that requires transparency in order to function
• Peters is an angry, ignorant and paranoid old man — and no one should listen to a word he says

The last point is worth dwelling on for a moment; in Accidental Guerrilla, David Kilcullen makes a point of calling Peters out for, essentially, being an angry, paranoid old man who doesn’t know nearly as much about war as he’d like to believe. This made me deeply appreciative of David Kilcullen. Peters’ position, however, does have a certain internal coherence. In makes sense in the context of the heroic vision that contemporary warbloggers/wingnuts create for themselves; they really seem to believe that they are key cogs in the American warfighting machine. As such, anyone who disputes their expertise and contribution is, by definition, objectively pro-terrorist.