The Wonk Room

McCain Adviser: Russians Are ‘Drink-Sodden Barbarians’

Speaking on the Russia-Georgia crisis at an American Enterprise Institute panel yesterday, John McCain foreign policy adviser/military fetishist Ralph Peters delivered this bit of straight talk:

The Russians, on whom I have wasted far too much of my life, are drink-sodden barbarians who occasionally puke up a genius.

As anyone who has read Peters’ work knows, Ralph’s world is full of barbarians who need killin’. In October 2006, as part of a column calling on the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, he declared:

If we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies. The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.

We are all, of course, deeply impressed by pundits who bravely call for “therapeutic violence” from the safety of their home offices.

Last November, Peters offered his learned interpretation of the Israel-Palestine conflict:

In the end, the problem’s difficulty can be put in New York City terms: A shiftless, violent family that turned an apartment into a slum was evicted. The new tenants cleaned up the place and made the apartment a showcase. Now the former tenants hate them for it – and want the apartment back.

While Peters is not the nuttiest of McCain’s advisers — that honor clearly belongs to James “Saddam Is Behind Everything!” Woolsey — it’s cause for concern that a man with a violent, bigoted mentality such as Peters has John McCain’s ear.