On the Newstand: David Rieff on Imperial Grunts

Unfortuantely theCardinal has company. Being the introvert that he is this is a less than thrilling prospect but there is little choice in the matter. This is doubly frustrating because he would like to carefully read and respond to David Rieff's cover reivew of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts found in this weeks TNR. I did not expect a positive review from Rieff and I was not disappointed. Rieff figures that the worst thing he can do to Kaplan is to tie his views to Donald Rumsfeld's:

This is not to say that Kaplan's views are uncontroversial. To the contrary, his basic contention--that the heart and soul of the American military is now its expeditionary component, above all the Marine Corps, and its commando component, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM)--is one that many senior officers and military intellectuals within the War Colleges and Service Academies would repudiate. But they would do so at their peril, since, as Kaplan himself notes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's implementation of the Global War on Terrorism has made SOCOM "a war fighting command in more than name only," and, however imperfectly (Kaplan blames this on turf battles within the Department of Defense), "the executive arm for the War on Terrorism." (General Eric Shinseki discovered, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that speaking before Congress in opposition to Rumsfeld's opinions resulted in forced retirement.)

Kaplan is a man with whom Rumsfeld would be hard pressed to find fault. Like Rumsfeld, he has no patience with what he calls "the formalized rigidity" of cold war-era military institutions unsuited for the wars and the counterinsurgency operations of the early twenty-first century. Like Rumsfeld, he believes that military successes during the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 demonstrated the viability of "deftly combining high-technology and low-tech unconventional warfare." And, perhaps more enthusiastically even than Rumsfeld, Kaplan sees the tactics being developed in the field by U.S. Special Operations forces as those that America "would employ to manage an unruly world."

Rieff is horrified at Kaplan's admiration for America's Armed Forces and for the comparison he draws to a previous conflict:

When the soldiers he meets do not remind him of Roman legionnaires, Kaplan is apt to compare them to Lewis and Clark or other early heroes of America's push westward, or else to what he calls "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy, without which the nation would not have been able to fight its later wars quite as well as it had." I wonder what the African American officers of today's U.S. military would make of that. The abdication of critical faculties implicit in such a historical comparison is startling in a writer as historically minded as Kaplan. The "gleaming" tradition to which he alludes helped to keep the military segregated until 1949, while its integration was a first step in the desegregation of the South. Indeed, the rise of a new American military that is probably the most intelligent, creative, and successful institution with regard to race relations in the United States represents a victory for the military tradition that looks back to the 54th Massachusetts and the Tuskeegee Airmen, not to Nathan Bedford Forrest's terrorism or to Stonewall Jackson sucking on his lemons at the First Battle of Manassas.

But this is not the most significant of Kaplan's many analogies between the American armed forces of today and its predecessors. The one that is most central to his argument views today's soldiers' fight against Islamists and terrorists as something very close to the Indian-fighting army of the nineteenth-century American West. Those wars too, Kaplan argues, were imperial in nature, and he refers without any further elaboration to "the new American empire west of the Mississippi River." His travels seem to have hardened him in this view: "As I traveled from continent to continent with the American military in the first years of the twenty-first century, my most recurring image would be the one that Remington himself might have painted: singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes."

This is breathtaking. Here is a serious writer in 2005 admiring the Indian wars, which in their brutality brought about the end of an entire American civilization. But then Kaplan goes to some lengths to describe the peoples who lived in North America when white settlers began to arrive as virtually without any civilization worthy of the name. "The North American Indians," he writes, "were a throwback to the nomadic horse peoples of the Eurasian steppe ... They [also] invited comparison with another imperial nemesis: the nineteenth century Pushtuns and Afridis of the Northwest Frontier of British India." And he concludes: "Beyond the Mississippi or Missouri rivers, the American military found a Hobbesian world in which internecine ethnic warfare, motivated by competition for territory and resources, was the primary fact of life."

The primary fact of life? Whatever else one can say about American Indian life in the nineteenth century, the primary fact was the arrival of the white settlers and the military forces that accompanied them, who drove the native peoples off their land, massacred tens if not hundreds of thousands of them, and deported the others to reservations far from arable land or the plains on which they had hunted. Kaplan may claim that a figure such as Remington--whom he admires as the American Kipling--stood for America's "righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos, a mission not unlike that of post-cold war humanitarian interventions," but the assertion is obscene. I doubt very much that many Indians would share Kaplan's enthusiasm for "Remington's mythic universe [in which] those early imperialists, the cavalry officers and the pathfinders, appropriated the warrior ideal of their Indian enemy, which was marked by bravery and steadfastness." Kaplan has been watching too many John Ford movies. Has he never heard of the Trail of Tears? Does he really think that describing Geronimo as having "lived out the last years of his life" at Fort Sill, Oklahoma adequately conveys what took place? Is describing the streets of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as being named for the various "North American Indian tribes with which the US Army negotiated truces" really a historically licit way of accounting for what took place, or how those truces were made? And what on earth does it mean for Kaplan to claim that the habit that American soldiers now have of referring to their postings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, Colombia, or the Philippines as "Indian Country" and, in Kaplan's view, that, like the Indian Wars, the war on terrorism is "really about taming the frontier," should not be understood as a "slight" against Native North Americans?

Rieff in full political correctness mode belabors the Indian theme for a couple of paragraphs before getting back to other things he hates about Imperial Grunts:

Too romantic and sentimental to be called analysis, too ideological to count as reportage, and yet too journalistic to be a straightforward polemic, Imperial Grunts is a disorganized and in many ways an incoherent book. Just when Kaplan the reporter is exercising his considerable talents to their best advantage, Kaplan the ideologue interrupts with his doctrine. As a result, there are times when Kaplan's narrative seems like an extended exercise in free association. In one representative passage, Kaplan is on the front line with a Marine unit moving into Fallujah during the first, abortive assault on the city in the spring of 2004, and splendidly describes the "grunts''' slow advance under fire. But then his attention shifts away from the battle and toward geo-strategical speculation and imperial history. Staring at enemy snipers a few hundred meters away in one paragraph, he opines in the next that "the third world urban environment was like the Old West." A few hundred words later, having briefly doubled back to a description of the fighting, then left it again, Kaplan is cantering from his belief that the martial spirit of "the Old Confederacy [stilli nhabits] the soul of the American military," to comparing the U.S. military's fight in Iraq to the British army's suppression of the Indian Mutiny, to a meditation on the role of the media on the conduct of military operations in the early twenty-first century. Then, after a space break, Kaplan is back to being a reporter again.

The American military deserves better than this kind of hagiography, just as it deserves better than to have to carry out the thankless and even hopeless missions that Kaplan would like to assign it--missions that, if the experience in Iraq proves anything, will fall clumsily short of any Kiplingesque grandeur. In fairness, Kaplan was never especially enthusiastic about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "The American empire of the early twenty-first century," he writes, "depended on a tissue of intangibles that was threatened, rather than invigorated, by the naked exercise of power." For Kaplan, the real success story of America's commitment to policing the planet (which he calls the "battle space for the American military") is the work of small units of elite U.S. troops, and sometimes even individual soldiers, controlling the world quietly in countries ranging from Yemen to Mongolia.

Rieff concludes his review somewhat perplexed with the book but hopeful that American soldiers really aren't like they are described by Kaplan:

The paradox is that he has written anything but a triumphalist book. The oddest thing about this odd book is its insistence on the transience of the American empire, even as he leaves no stone unturned in his effort to glorify it. "To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment," he observes in his first chapter, "Injun Country." It was "a moment that even if it lasted for several more decades would constitute but a flicker among the long march of hegemons that had calmed broad swaths of the globe." He then goes on to enumerate various empires and their lifespans, from the Achaemenids to the British, by way of the Chinese, the Vandals, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and of course the Romans.

But then he teaches that "a liberal empire like America was likely to create the conditions for its own demise, and thus to be particularly short-lived." So this is not Kipling, it is Spengler. Kaplan is tragically wrong-headed even within his own frame of reference. Put the case, debatable as it is, that the United States is an empire in the same sense that Britain, or Portugal, or Spain, or Rome were empires. Further put the case, as Kaplan also does, that this empire will be gone in no more than several decades. Why on earth would any American patriot, "a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism," as Kaplan puts it, or anyone who just wishes America well, condemn the country to what, on his own account, will be a not-so-long march toward a bleak and broken future? Why not strive, in this case, to create a multi-lateral international order that, taking into account the inevitable rise of new hegemons such as India and China, organizes the international system as favorably as possible toward the interests of the United States?

The Kipling of "The White Man's Burden," whom Kaplan goes to such lengths to defend, was not beseeching the United States to become an imperial power with all the eloquence at his command, while simultaneously holding in his head the vision of the proximate dissolution of that empire. But this seems to be Kaplan's vision, insofar as anything consistent can be extrapolated from his breathless dithyramb to the boots on the ground. Or are we back to Larteguy's lonely centurion, acutely conscious that back in Rome everything is going to hell even as he faithfully carries out his duty on the forward ramparts of the empire--SOCOM in swords and sandals? The good news is that this may describe Kaplan more accurately than it describes his grunts. He reports that "the grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial." He does not explain the distinction, but it seems to be a sign at least of good sense in these American soldiers. So there is hope for the Republic yet.