By FREDERICK J. CHIAVENTONE
Last updated: 10:59 am
July 6, 2008
Posted: 2:00 am
July 6, 2008
Retired Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters lives by a creed: To seek what "no academic texts or intelligence documents can give you: the scent of daily life, the temper of the people, the taste of the land. Traveling, you take in far more than you understand, calories of knowledge waiting to fuel some future intellectual labor."
Peter's life is a binge on such calories. First as a long-haired student and erstwhile musician, and later as a commissioned Army officer, he has traveled to more than 70 different nations on six continents - none particularly peaceful.
Through Russia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, Peters, national security columnist for The Post, developed a keen eye for real global conditions. "The way in which the finest artists see more acutely than others mirrors a top-of-the-game intelligence analyst's ability to block out humanity's white noise and listen to the revealing undertones."
He traveled with official sanction, but all too often on his own hook. "There was nothing like firsthand exposure to dialectical materialism to teach you that the dialectic seldom delivered the material. Leftist rhetoric is wonderfully seductive. The tragedy is that those stirring promises are worthless."
When his duties permit, Peters heads for the back of beyond - Yerevan, Samarkand, Bukhara, Groznyy, Nagorno-Karabakh. In Tbilisi, he finds himself at four in the morning with a drunken local madman at the wheel. "Instead of stopping we launched into the air, ripped through the bushes, and thumped down on the grass and flowers of the island. Still rolling at speed but with the front wheels wobbling madly, the rest of the car complained like the patients in a Manhattan emergency room on a Saturday night."
