No, this isn't an edition of the Chuckie Watch, though it might as well be. This is a "how did blithering idiots like this get in charge of American foreign policy?" post.
Want to know why the Iraq War is such a roaring disaster? Because people like this are actually taken seriously on important issues of life and death: Indian Country by Robert Kaplan Wall Street Journal 09/25/04. (Appeared in the print edition 09/21/04.) I should note that Kaplan does not espouse exactly the "neoconservative" gospel of wars of liberation. It's callous cynicism in creating propaganda frameworks for reckless and destructive policies, preached from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, to which I'm reacting.
There was a time, really not that long ago, when people this daffy were confined to writing articles for obscure John Birch Society pamphlets about the Jewish conspiracy running the world. But Robert Kaplan is an influential writer on foreign affairs with the Atlantic Monthly. (See Laura Rozen's profile of him in Salon.com 04/17/01.)
Just go read this article. We've got fools like this with their (literal!) cowboy-and-Indian fantasies setting foreign policy and thinking they're going to remake the Arab Middle East by Napoleanic wars of liberation redefined as Hollywood Westerns. These people crazy!
A person who pretends to be a serious thinker (or at least serious writer), who wouldn't want to be thought of as sharing anything but party affiliation with a pseudo-redneck posturer like Chuckie or a bigoted Oxycontin junkie like Rush Limbaugh actually writes stuff like this and puts his name to it in public:
[B]efore [the American military] had adequately transformed itself from a dinosaurian, Industrial Age beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla warfare, attuned to the local environment in the way of the 19th-century Apaches.
My mention of the Apaches is deliberate. For 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.
Yee-haw, boys! We gone meet up with John Wayne out yonder on the prairie and deal with them Injun varmits right quick!
Remember: these are people who would be shocked and offended that someone might suggest they were pandering to brainless bigots. But these fools are creating metaphors that the Republican Party war makers are happy to convert into operative ideology.
Why is our Iraq policy a wreck? Why are the jihadists having a surge of support? A big part of it is that babbling lunacy like this gets taken seriously these days in Washington and in Crawford, Texas:
The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century. But they don't mean it as a slight against the Native North Americans. The fact that radio call signs so often employ Indian names is an indication of the troops' reverence for them. (my emphasis)
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the distinguished writer Robert Kaplan hangs out in cowboy boys drankin' beer and listenin' to Toby Keith on the radio and talkin' smack like, "Hail, boys, I know it ain't politically correct to be talkin' about killin' A-rabs like a bunch of scalpin' Injuns. But shoot, that don't mean I'm no kind a racist or nothin'. Why, hail, boys, some my best friends is Injuns and, you know, nigras and stuff."
No, that image doesn't work. There would be too many people in those bars who had served in Iraq, or how had brothers or cousins or wives or husbands or buddies serving there, or who were about to be called up in the National Guard for a year or two of duty, or who figure their kids will be facing the draft in about another month or two if Bush gets elected. They might be inclined to explain to him just what they think about loudmouth warmongers who cheer for war and killing based on lies. It would be an enlightening experience for Kaplan, I'm sure.
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 investedIndian 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, who, because of the dissolution of the conscript army at the end of the Civil War, no longer empathized with a volunteer force beyond the Mississippi that was drawn from the working classes.
This just makes me want to puke. The rest of the long article is the same kind of mindless, warmongering drivel. But it's drivel that our policymakers take seriously. So those of us who don't want to spend the rest of our lives living in the nightmare world that these space cadets have in mind for us have to pay some attention.
Kaplan describes basically the entire Muslim world as "Indian country." And what to the good American cowboys have to do to bring the American War of Life to Injun country? Here are some of Rancher Kaplan's suggestions for advocates like himself for "the American imperial future":
* Understand that terrorism will get worse and worse until that far-away utopian day when American-approved democracy reigns in all countries where Muslims live. (Hint: by neoconservative standards, not even the great-grandchildren of anyone alive today will see that time arrive.)
* Make sure reporters don't get any news about all them squaws and papooses we've got to be gunning down and blowing up. ("In Indian Country, it is not only the outbreak of a full-scale insurgency that must be avoided, but the arrival in significant numbers of the global media.") Those weak-kneed, sissified humanitarians who are squamish about shedding a river or two of civilian blood to bring the blessings of peace and freedom to them there Muslims will just whine about it all if they know what's happening. You can't bring civilization to the heathen if you let a bunch of wimmin and girlie-men slow you down with all their cowardly sniveling.
* All this crap about civilian control of the military has just got to ease up. We've done just fine with Rummy as the Defense Secretary being the country's de facto foreign minister. We should keep on with that fine tradition.
* Train local dictators to do as much of our dirty work as we can.
* Pretend for the rubes that you think something was wrong with the Iraq War. ("And 130,000 [US troops on the ground], as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat--regardless of one's position on the war.")
* After we massacre a village and most of its braves, squaws and papooses, give some of the surviving Injuns enough wampum and whiskey so they'll stay drunk and leave us alone. ("In Indian Country, as one general officer told me, 'you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects.'")
This silly fantasist concludes:
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.
If it's occurred to you at all to wonder how much of the "lessons of Vietnam" American policymakers have learned, take a good look at this pitiful man's disgusting piece in the Wall Street Journal. When whichever president to whom the nightmare of extricating the United States from Iraq falls manages to find some half-plausible way to claim that we've done enough there and pulls out the troops, there will be plenty of war propagandists like Kaplan still hard at work. They will pretend that with with a few troops, a lot of arrogance and a cynical disregard for any "decent respect to the opinions of mankind", the US can invade any country it wants and the happy natives will welcome us with open arms and flower petals tossed into the paths of our tanks. (The "decent respect" quotation is from Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, not from Kaplan, who to all appearances finds such a thing inconceivable.)
And there will be people who are happy to be fooled by them and their reckless, lunatic theories. As long as it's not the people making American foreign policy, they won't be able to do the kind of harm to the US and to the world that the Bush administration has done with the Iraq War.
But if you think the inmates are running the asylum now, wait until you see what happens if there's a second George W. Bush administration.
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