From OneNewsNow:

Jim Brown OneNewsNow.comApril 23, 2007

A retired military officer has told an audience of top-level Israeli and American experts that the main problems the U.S. and Israel are having in the war on terror are not military ones. He made his comments at a Washington, DC, conference hosted by the Israel Democracy Institute and the Israel Project called “Democracies Fighting Terror: What Can Israel and the U.S. Learn from Each Other’s Experiences?”

One of the speakers at the conference, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters (U.S. Army-Ret.), observed that the fundamental problem the U.S. and Israel face in fighting terrorism is a crisis in leadership in both countries. He said he believes the “worst possible immorality” for the government of either country would be to lose.

“We’re obsessed upon the misbehavior of the individual soldier or the squad at the roadblock,” Peters asserted. “And I’m not advocating war crimes or indulgence of atrocity — by no means,” he said. “But we need to keep things in perspective. And when Israel or the United States lose, civilization suffers.”

The retired Army officer told the conference crowd that, in order to increase their military effectiveness, both the U.S. and Israel need to reexamine their assumptions about what is moral in war time. He pointed to the bombing of Dresden in World War II as an example.

“It was moral to firebomb Dresden, and actually, I have no problem with the firebombing of Dresden,” Peters says, “but a lot of people that you could have described as technically innocent died. And yet, if a soldier shoots one civilian, it’s a war crime.”

And so, the lieutenant colonel continued, “you have this bizarre discrepancy where pilots can kill hundreds of the innocents and their careers advance. If we have an incident — especially if the media is there, of course — where one or two or three civilians die in a misunderstanding at a roadblock, there’s a huge investigation.”

Peters is author of the forthcoming book, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century (Stackpole Books, 2007). He says he remains an adamant supporter of Israel because it is willing to live in peace with its neighbors, while significant numbers of its neighbors want it destroyed and every Jew dead.