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ralph peters

Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002. He is also Fox News' first Strategic Analyst. Ralph served for over two decades in the U.S. Army, as an enlisted man and officer, before retiring in 1998 to write and speak freely. He has experience in over 70 countries and is the author of 24 books, including novels, an adventure-travel memoir and works on strategy. While his home is at the Post, he also has editorial or contributor relationships with Armed Forces Journal, Armchair General Magazine and USAToday. He writes from the Washington, D.C. area, but remains, at heart, a proud coalcracker from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.

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    Ballots beat bombs

    Threats, bombs and at least 36 dead didn't stop Iraqis from voting on Sunday. But the harder part -- forming a new, more inclusive national government -- lies ahead. Formal results won't come for a few days. We'll...  

    March 09, 2010 12:00 AM
  • You can’t win hearts, minds of radical Islam

    A good first step in waging war is to figure out why your enemy is fighting. For over eight years, we've refused to do that in Afghanistan. In the recent Marine offensive against the Taliban in Marjah, this resulted in...  

    March 06, 2010 8:21 PM
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    Betraying freedom in Latin America

    I was wrong. For years, I've argued that our government should pay more attention to South America. Now Hillary Clinton has -- and, boy, is it ugly. With tragic back-to-back earthquakes dominating the headlines from...  

    March 03, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Nuclear countdown

    The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency now not only admits that Iran's at work on nuclear warheads, but acknowledges that Tehran never stopped working on them -- despite no end of pleas, pledges and promises....  

    February 20, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Big capture, big questions

    The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win. Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran...  

    February 17, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Textbook takeover

    Attacking behind a vanguard of special operators and backed by an Army Stryker battalion, the 6th Marine Regiment has been conducting a textbook takeover of the Afghan city of Marjah. Meticulously planned and...  

    February 15, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Iran's birthday bash

    Yesterday, the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran celebrated its 31st birthday with nuclear candles, crushing Iranian dreams of freedom and Western hopes of appeasement. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his...  

    February 12, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Miranda wrongs

    In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber. With fumbling terrorism czar John...  

    February 09, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Terrorizing terrorists

    As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war. Drones work. They kill terrorists....  

    February 04, 2010 12:00 AM
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    America's bipartisan Latin folly

    While pundits called President Obama on his failure to mention Israel and the Palestinian problem in last week's State of the Union Address, a far greater omission went ignored: Latin America. Aside from one...  

    February 02, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Nightmare in the Middle East

    Whatever planet Earth may find in short supply in 2010, violence and misrule will remain abundant, from the most-recent round of Muslim-vs.-Christian massacres in Nigeria to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez's delight in...  

    January 30, 2010 7:45 PM
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    Taliban for sale?

    A highlight of this week's "what do we do about Afghanistan?" conference in London will be the announcement of a $500-million program to bribe low-level Taliban fighters to quit. I'm all for any program that...  

    January 27, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Facing the facts on fake states

    What do Haiti and Afghanistan have in common, other than the presence of our military? They're both profoundly failed states that we pretend just need the right encouragement. We told ourselves that in Somalia, too....  

    January 25, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Killing Muslims

    AL Qaeda does one thing ex tremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational's victims were Westerners. The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda...  

    January 23, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Losing the info war

    The Taliban scored a powerful psychological victory yesterday, as fewer than two dozen suicide attackers brought Afghanistan's government and capital city to a standstill. In a dramatic wave of attacks (possibly...  

    January 19, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Hood massacre report gutless and shameful

    There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday): * It's not about what happened at Fort Hood. * It avoids...  

    January 16, 2010 12:00 AM
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    Google geeks vs. the Beijing bandits

    Google may have the backbone Congress lacks: The Internet giant is standing up to the bandits in Beijing. Why would a for-profit company threaten to pull out of what the investment gurus (who brought you the housing...  

    January 15, 2010 12:00 AM
  • O's 'fixes' will fail

    On Christmas day, a terrorist known to our intelligence system tried to blow up 300 innocents on a US-bound flight. Our government's response is to take porno pictures of your wife and daughter. A radical-Islamist...  

    January 09, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Our Afghan intel mess

    'Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to our overall strategy." That's the opening line from a courageous, heartfelt report, "Fixing Intel," just...  

    January 07, 2010 12:00 AM
  • Terrorism's triumphant techniques

    Our terrorist enemies are out-thinking us. It's not only embarrassing, but deadly. The Taliban's latest innovation was on display again last week, when a suicide bomber, reportedly garbed in an Afghan army uniform,...  

    January 04, 2010 12:00 AM
  • O's day of reckoning

    It's showtime, folks! Today's the deadline President Obama imposed on Iran's leaders to give up their nuclear ambitions and be nice. Not sure if the deadline expires at midnight in Tehran or on Washington time, but...  

    December 31, 2009 12:00 AM
  • Lying to ourselves

    On Christmas Day, an Islamist fanatic tried to blow up an airplane whose passengers were mostly Christians. And we helped. Our government gets no thanks for preventing a tragedy. Only the bomber's ineptitude...  

    December 29, 2009 12:00 AM
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    Our Christmas Guardians

    Each year at Christmas, we remember our troops, far from home, standing be tween us and the latest Herods out to slaughter the innocents. As a former soldier, my thoughts are with the "ground pounders" out there,...  

    December 25, 2009 12:00 AM
  • 2010: The year of bankrupt gov'ts

    Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But he only comes for kids -- not for governments that have bragged, borrowed and spent their way into bankruptcy. Two Thousand Ten is going to belong to the Grinch. For...  

    December 23, 2009 12:00 AM
  • CyberPeace is not Russia's goal

    A recent front-page New York Times article painted a picture of peace-loving Russians finally persuading the evil Americans to pursue disarmament in cyberspace. The paper hasn't pushed the Kremlin's line so...  

    December 18, 2009 12:00 AM
  • Afghanistan: Weighing the war

    No human endeavor is more complex than warfare, and the battlefield is the realm of the unexpected. Will our troop-surge chemistry lead to a stable Afghan compound, or just to more combustion? Since President Obama...  

    December 16, 2009 12:00 AM
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    When scientists lie

    In the most notorious trial in the history of science, the Inquisition condemned Galileo in 1633. The aged scientist was forced to recant his life’s work. The fact that the earth revolves around the sun threatened the...  

    December 12, 2009 3:11 AM
  • Avengers for Allah

    In recent weeks, a renewed epidemic of suicide bombings has swept Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, climaxing in huge blasts in Baghdad that killed 130 innocents on Tuesday. The Obama administration says these bombings...  

    December 10, 2009 2:00 AM
  • Faking an Osama drama

    Reliably sympathetic to non-Western lies, the BBC reported yesterday that a prisoner in Pakistani custody knows a guy who saw Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan last January. Headlines! Now, Osama may, indeed, pop...  

    December 05, 2009 12:00 AM
  • Setting up our military to fail

    Just plain nuts: That's the only possible characterization for last night's presidential declaration of surrender in advance of a renewed campaign in Afghanistan. President Obama will send 30,000 more troops to...  

    December 02, 2009 12:00 AM