(via LGF)  FANTASTIC interview with Ralph Peters at American Heritage.  I'll post a  few key excerpts...

On foriegn policy idealism & regime change:

There are certainly times when we desire stability in international politics, but in the underdeveloped world an obsession with stability means preserving failure and worse. Overvaluing stability is a heritage of the Cold War... you can’t justify it now...If we support evil, the long-term price is almost always too high. And now we don’t have to.

On Protestant reformation vs. Islam:

Freedom of information originates in two things, the movable type printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter benefits everybody, irrespective of his or her religion, because it breaks down the idea of there being just one path to the truth. The printing press makes the Reformation possible, because suddenly the one true church can no longer contain heretical movements. Information travels faster than it can be suppressed. And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in the one path to the truth, you can’t have science.

In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulugh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying. There are myriad factors in the Islamic decline, but the decline itself has been irreversible. Muslims never turn it around; they never have their reformation that breaks down the one true path.

The real root cause --

 ...Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy.

The central role of Women's rights & sexuality in creating a future --

I believe that a primeval terror of female sexuality is a significant strategic factor, one we’ve failed to examine. Males in these traditional cultures see the pictures of Pamela Anderson or replay Sharon Stone movies, and they want a piece of the action. But they don’t want their daughters and wives to turn into Pamela Anderson, or Britney Spears, or, for that matter, Emmylou Harris. They’re mesmerized by the sexual component in our culture, which our media grossly exaggerate and which they misread.

They don’t understand that most Americans lead surprisingly moral lives, that we work, we go to church, and we’re not constantly lascivious. We have a good time when we’re in college and when we’re young; then we mostly get it out of our systems. But that doesn’t work in a culture that sees female virginity as the ultimate good to be traded to your familial or clan advantage. We’ve outgrown that view, although it took us a long time. In the West the great revolution of the twentieth century was the birth control pill. The transition from women as property to women as full participants in society has been the greatest revolution in human history, and its reverberations will be felt for centuries. Repressive cultures are horrified by it because it calls into question their most fundamental biological, sociological, and religious ideas. However, the oppression of women anywhere is not only a human rights violation, it’s a suicide pact with the future.

I'll refrain from quoting too much more but it's really good stuff.   Peters also makes numerous GREAT points on

• the Saudi's ("the Arab World's Beverly Hillbillies")
• the role of women in the US economy ("Greenspan's done a good job but the feminists put us over the top")
• US economic development

---