Book Pages: Eliot Cohen on Imperial Grunts

At the WaPost Eliot Cohen gives his take on Imperial Grunts. Cohen has his quibbles with Kaplan:

He notes more than once how much he despises the academic, journalistic, diplomatic and wonkish elites...And he takes on many of the other dislikes of the men (he encounters very few American women in this book) with whom he lives: diplomats, bureaucrats, most Army general officers, lumbering regular-army units, and all REMFs (an acronym unfit for printing in a family newspaper whose first letters stand for "rear echelon").

After a while, these sentiments begin to look more like a chip on the shoulder than an argument; they are, in any event, a distraction from the purpose of the book, which is to depict elements of the U.S. Army (Special Forces soldiers, above all) and some units in the Marine Corps in the front lines of the awkwardly named "global war on terror."

Considering Cohen's background you can understand why he bristles at the criticism of wonkish elites yet Cohen goes on to say a great deal of good things about the book and Kaplan's writing:

As befits such a global tour, Kaplan is a very good travel writer indeed. He superbly describes bazaars and rainforests, brothels and junkyards, hootches and bases, M-4 carbines and M-240 machine guns, heat and dust. He captures in a few pages what it takes to train a moderately competent sergeant or plan an assault on Fallujah.

He is also an acute observer of soldiers. His is a picture of perhaps the most experienced and able military the United States has ever had, led by junior and mid-level officers and NCOs who are versatile, self-reliant and quick-witted. It is also a military that is culturally distinct from the stateside groups that make policy -- the latte-swilling cultural elites at whom Kaplan periodically thumbs his nose.

Ultimately Cohen is not so convinced of Kaplan's assertion of the inevitability of American empire (careful Dr. Cohen or you can't write for Weekly Standard anymore) nor that the most active element of US foreign policy should be a Special Forces soldier but a diplomat. Nonetheless Cohen finds Imperial Grunts to be a book worth reading:

Kaplan has made a career of bravely covering the ungoverned parts of this world. Until Sept. 11, 2001, when the consequences of allowing al Qaeda its Afghan base became clear, most Americans did not think they had to care very much about them; some would argue that we still should not. But chaos exercises its compulsions even upon reluctant imperialists. There are many instruments of national power other than the military, some of which Kaplan unfairly ignores -- think of the diplomats and activists who helped secure the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for instance. Nor should one be as comfortable as he is with having the military assume foreign-policy-making roles; plumbers should not be architects. But for better or worse, the grunts Kaplan describes so brilliantly will be out there representing America in the chaotic zones of a dangerous world, and to understand them one is well advised to read this book.