SubscribeWith his new book, Kaplan turns from describing the world's ills to proposing a remedy. The antidote to anarchy is empire, policed by American soldiers holding an assault rifle in one hand and offering candy bars with the other...Andrew Bacevich
According to Kaplan, the world's sole superpower doesn't especially need tanks and fighter-bombers, artifacts from a military age now past. Instead, it ought to be investing in something akin to a "Peace Corps with guns." ...All that's required is to turn them loose and to get out of the way. After all, as Kaplan explains in an assertion sure to come as news to the Air Force and the Northern Alliance, a mere handful of special operations troops "conquered Afghanistan by themselves."
Kaplan's chapter on the Philippines details his stay in Zamboanga, where Filipino authorities have been engaged in a never-ending struggle against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. After 9/11 Washington classified the Moros as part of the global terrorist conspiracy and dispatched a contingent of military advisers to assist the Filipino army. For the Pentagon the southern Philippines became, in Kaplan's words, "a laboratory for drying up an Islamic insurgency, as well as for small-scale nation-building."
...The effort yielded a meager harvest. Although the Americans killed plenty of Moros, including notoriously large numbers of women and children, resistance to US rule proved to be inextinguishable. Imaginative and energetically implemented nation-building programs had a negligible impact. Several decades of colonial tutelage produced a present-day Philippine nation that Kaplan himself describes as "dysfunctional, intractable, and poverty-stricken," not to mention "pathetically corrupt." Indeed, Kaplan observes--correctly--that "from 1902 to 1913, America's attempt to impose democracy had led to a more militant Islam." Why will present-day attempts to dry up this perpetual insurgency yield a different result? He does not say.
Kaplan conceived of his visit to Iraq as an opportunity to witness US Marines, tapping their rich history in "small wars," winning Iraqi hearts and minds. But unforeseen events intervened. When insurgents murdered four American contractors in Falluja on March 31, 2004, priorities changed: Cultural sensitivity suddenly mattered less than brute force. Battering Falluja into submission saw Marines resorting to the "Big Army" methods that Kaplan had earlier disdained, complete with tanks, fighter-bombers and an abundance of firepower. The assault on Falluja was the "classic, immemorial labor of infantry" reminiscent of Vietnam and World War II. It wasn't tea with warlords; it was a bloodbath.
On whether the effort advanced the boundaries of free society and good governance, Kaplan remains silent. But certainly the successive battles for Falluja--indeed, the mess that is present-day Iraq--calls into question Kaplan's contention that scattering Special Forces teams hither and yon will enable the United States to bring the Injuns to heel. There will always be recalcitrants willing and determined to fight.
Kaplan introduces Imperial Grunts with this typically bold assertion: "By the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice." Whether such an assessment of US military power was ever accurate is doubtful. By 2005, however, it had become demonstrably false. Hard-pressed to hold on to the new provinces to which today's architects of empire have laid claim, America's armed forces are in no position to appropriate more. As for the Pentagon's ability to flood additional obscure quarters of the earth, the troops required to do so simply do not exist.
The real story of the present-day US military, which the peripatetic Kaplan somehow has managed to overlook, is one of power squandered--lives lost, dollars wasted, a glittering reputation sullied. It's enough to suggest that a militarized empire might not be such a great idea after all.
And the book goes to pieces immediately. The first problem is headgear. Kaplan's got both his hats on at the same time, and the travel writer (who likes flavors and vistas) keeps barging in. "Who here was Al Qaeda? I asked myself, licking my fingers after devouring a greasy chicken in a sidewalk restaurant filled with armed youngsters." The next one is my favorite: "We were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared." And it's a shame such well-traveled eyes are welded between numb ears: Details are "grisly," murders are "gruesome"; you hear "faint" echoes but "shrill" cries; "chiseled" bodies cross "manicured" landscapes; troops become "hardened," resemblances grow "uncanny." Kaplan is trying for fine writing - literary special effects - but he doesn't resist the old grooves, and if a writer can't avoid stock expression, it suggests imprisonment at the conceptional level. Kaplan keeps getting into scrapes at the keyboard. "I wanted a visual sense of the socioeconomic stew in which Al Qaeda flourished." You smile in admiration, as at something rare, like a triple play; it's a double mixed metaphor."Imprisonment at the conceptional level"—I like that.
Now, he has gone even further in showing us his real colors. Taking the idea of a globalized "manifest destiny" role for the US to its logical extreme, he has now started calling openly for the US military to act in the rest of the world as though it were in "Indian country".This book, was broad in terms of the historical and political background provided, however was quite narrow in terms of the first person narrative, and tactical and logistical analysis of US operations abroad. I'm not sure some of the reviewers got that.
What does this mean? As he tells us in this Sept. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it means this:
in a world where mass infantry invasions are becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive -- even as dirty little struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles -- the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians...
The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry and Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the early 21st century. When the Cavalry invested Indian encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East...
Be aware that Kaplan is not merely noting or commenting on this "Indian-fighting" approach; he is openly advocating it.
..And nor does Robert Kaplan ever let the mere logic (or illogic) of an argument get in the way of his schoolyard bravado. At the end of that piece he argues:
The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry forage for horses... Had it not been for a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad, security never would have been brought to the Old West.
Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form. To help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches.
Well, he's certainly right that, at the global level, there are "no new settlers to help us"... .
Among the effusive endorsements adorning Imperial Grunts is one by Bing West describing Kaplan as "America's Kipling." Like Kipling, Kaplan is smitten with barracks rooms, mess halls and the "world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobaccos" that soldiers ostensibly inhabit. In a nation crowded with charlatans, soldiers--"people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty"-- retain for Kaplan an authenticity otherwise fast disappearing from American life.--He endorses the muscular Protestant fundamentalism that over the past thirty years has tacitly established itself as the quasi-official religion of America's armed forces, its abiding theme not love thy neighbor but smite thine enemy. He notes approvingly that in today's military the spirit of the Old South lives on, with the very best captains and majors finding their role models in "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy." Indeed, Kaplan locates the "true religious soul" of present-day professional soldiers in "the martial evangelicalism of the South."
Authenticity in this context connotes masculinity and self-abnegation. In an age redolent of sham and corruption, soldiers--having "taken a veritable monastic vow of poverty"--retain an "unapologetic, literal belief in God...tempered and uplifted by the democratic experience." As a consequence, they are compassionate as well as brave, rough around the edges but also refreshingly honest.
If Kaplan is a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary. He dotes over the career sergeants who come out of rural America and the "generic working class," in Kaplan's eyes "the Great Preserver of the oldest, simplest virtues." He endorses the muscular Protestant fundamentalism that over the past thirty years has tacitly established itself as the quasi-official religion of America's armed forces, its abiding theme not love thy neighbor but smite thine enemy. He notes approvingly that in today's military the spirit of the Old South lives on, with the very best captains and majors finding their role models in "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy." Indeed, Kaplan locates the "true religious soul" of present-day professional soldiers in "the martial evangelicalism of the South."
Reactionary populists idealize the past because they loathe the present. Kaplan proves no exception. Fawning over soldiers as a virtuous remnant of a lost, better age, he misses no opportunity to express his contempt for his contemporaries who do not share in the austere existence of the classic man-at-arms. The targets of his wrath include, but are by no means limited to, narcissistic intellectuals, risk-averse politicians, micromanaging generals, bean-counting bureaucrats, wimpy journalists who have never visited Djibouti or Mongolia, the entire "policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York--in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions," and all manner of effete civilians, especially those residing in New England, which Kaplan, who makes his home in Massachusetts, describes as awash with pacifists.
Why are such people worth defending? How is it that a warped and decadent society manages to produce such sturdy warriors? Hovering in the background of his snapshot, these questions do not interest Kaplan. He prefers to focus on the American soldier in the field, where the order of the day has less to do with defending the country per se than with managing a global empire.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University in 1998, he taught at West Point and at Johns Hopkins University.We don't agree with you or your favorite author of the month, so we must not get it... right? Because we're too simple, we must not be able to grasp your manical concepts of the world?
Dr. Bacevich is the author most recently of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005). His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002) and The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003). His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Conservative, and The New Republic . His op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among other newspapers...
Helena Cobban has contributed a regular column to the Christian Science Monitor since 1990, covering such issues as strategic affairs, human rights, peace-building, global governance and international justice. The latest of her five books is The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss our Global Future. She is currently senior global affairs fellow with the University of Virginia's Institute for Practical Ethics.
Christian Caryl is the Tokyo Bureau Chief of Newsweek. He has reported from 35 countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, and North Korea.
The German General Staff, he said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler's mighty armies depended upon about fifty thousand officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated. On this I thought it right to say: "The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions. Even if in war passion they allowed them to begin, they would turn violently against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place. The Soviets must be under no delusion on this point."Of course Stalin did employ such methods, as Katyn Forest demonstrates: the NKVD shot 20,000 Polish prisoners after the invasion of Poland, including about half of the Polish officer corps.
Stalin however, perhaps only in mischief, pursued the subject. "Fifty thousand," he said, "must be shot." I was deeply angered. "I would rather," I said, "be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country's honour by such infamy."
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