Robert D. Kaplan: Warriors Vote Republican

[Moses]

More evidence of the Judeo-fascism (neoconism) that has seized control of US, that this truly repulsive, unamerican propaganda gets published in this day and age in America. It is unbelievable that something this shallow gets any serious attention. Robert D. Kaplan exemplifies the sinister, unamerican propaganda of the neocons. These are the writings of a foreigner, alien to America and its history, trying to transform america into a repugnant military theocracy, modeled after, and in the service of Israel. And I say that as a parent of an elite special forces warrior. This man, and the rest of his network in the media and other US institutions, is an Enemy of America:


Warriors vote Republican

Today's fighting men and women follow an ancient, elite code of honor and duty. And Democrats just don't get it, says author ROBERT D. KAPLAN


05:32 PM CST on Sunday, January 8, 2006



Virtually all close observers inside and outside the U.S. military estimate that anywhere from 70 percent to 80 percent of active-duty servicemen, reservists and National Guardsmen voted Republican in the last presidential election. I suspect that among the noncommissioned ranks of the combat arms community – the grunts – that figure may have been significantly higher. What makes me think so?

I spent part of the summer of 2004 in West Africa with a platoon of U.S. Marines. I would guess that, with few exceptions, they voted for President Bush. Some feared that the Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, would end the war in Iraq before they had a chance “to get in on the fight.”
DallasNews.com/extra

Tell Us: What should the Democratic Party do to be more attractive to military voters?


Election night found me in a restaurant-bar in central Alaska frequented by members of an Army infantry brigade about to be deployed to Iraq. As the results from Florida and Ohio came in – and for days afterward – the mood was of relief sometimes bordering on euphoria. They, too, would get to fight. What the Ivy League professoriate is to the Democratic Party, the fighting units of the U.S. military are to the Republicans.

Wanting to fight is an ordinary emotion for those who choose combat arms as a profession. In My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Winston Churchill's memoir of his days as a soldier and journalist, he writes of elation in the ranks when his unit of the Indian army was ordered from serene southern India to the Afghan frontier to fight rebellious tribesmen. He describes “the delicious yet tremulous sensations” that professional soldiers, bred in a time of peace, feel when approaching “an actual theatre of operations.”

To a greater degree than today's media commentators, Mr. Churchill cut to the essence of America's fighting units, liberated by 9-11 from a policy that did not allow for significant personal risk, particularly in the case of ground troops. Owing to social changes in American society and structural changes in the American military, the combat arms community, which like all elite groups is self-selecting, has gradually become an antique world of warrior honor. That elite, in a very subtle but critical way, finds more kinship with Mr. Churchill's concept of soldiering, as laid down in his early works about Afghanistan and Sudan, than with America's citizen soldiers of World War II.

In fact, for grunts whose fathers and by now, yes, grandfathers fought in Vietnam, World War II lies so far in the past that it might as well be the Peloponnesian War – even though World War II happens to be the last war that the nation's cultural elite feels comfortable celebrating.

Among Marines and Army Special Forces with whom I have embedded for long stretches, two favorite films are Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers (2002) and John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), both of which portray Vietnam in a heroic, somewhat romantic light – much the way old black-and-white movies of the 1940s and 1950s portrayed the Second World War.

Truly, Vietnam has been discussed ad nauseam, especially in the 2004 presidential campaign. But the aspect of Vietnam that helps reveal why the grunts are so alienated from the political elite – and particularly from the Democratic Party – has rarely been discussed at all.

While left-wing elites continue to refer to the Vietnam War as wrong and dishonorable, it happens to be the war where the antique code of honor had its birth for the present generation of American soldiery. It's also the war of which the forebears of those now fighting in front-line units in Iraq harbor the keenest memories. As one Mexican-American Marine sergeant explained to me, fighting in Iraq was the only way he could prove to his uncle, a Vietnam veteran, that he was worthy of his legacy.

When I asked another Marine in Iraq why he hated Mr. Kerry so much, he snapped, “Because he wasn't proud of his service in Vietnam – he threw away his medals at a demonstration that only rich kids went to.” (Actually, Mr. Kerry only pretended to throw them away, but this Marine did not know that.)

Rather than a war of national survival, Vietnam was, to a large extent, an expeditionary struggle for the sake of strategic positioning, in which honor meant seeing the d**n thing through, as well as keeping commitments to local allies. Because the reasons for waging it were debatable, it forged a caste identity for a newly established, volunteer military akin to that of the French Foreign Legion and some 19th-century British regiments.

Unlike the wealthier members of their generation, the working-class volunteers of this new American military believed unambiguously in the essential goodness of their nation's mission. They were not particularly interested in policy debates about where and where not to intervene – debates that, in any case, were above their pay grade. The more deployments they got, the happier they were. It was that simple.

Mr. Bush's response to 9-11 released the spirit of this new warrior guild – and that spirit is giving rise to a particular community. Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins University writes in a monograph, Culture's Mask: War and Change After Iraq, that today's post-9-11 military – with four years of ground combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq behind it, not to mention Special Operations deployments in dozens of other countries on a regular basis – constitutes a class of crusty, colonial-like veterans ready to rule as well as fight.

“I like Bush because he's dumb and stubborn like us,” one Marine corporal in Iraq told me only half in jest. “He'll fight to the finish here, no matter how bad it looks now.” In other words, pace Harvard's Harvey Mansfield, in his forthcoming Manliness: A Modest Defense, Mr. Bush is a man who, like the grunts, comprehends that duty takes precedence over perfect virtue.

Grunts – men, too, in Mr. Mansfield's definition – hate being portrayed as victims just as much as they hate being portrayed as war criminals: whether victims of not enough up-armored vehicles or of an ill-begotten war. Marines, in particular, have always taken pride in making due with inferior equipment. That's because they see themselves as warriors, which is exactly how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sees them. If Democrats see our armed forces likewise, they haven't satisfactorily communicated it to the troops.

I am not justifying the lack of steel-plated Humvees and other equipment-related instances of Pentagon mismanagement, but I am saying that this has not led to a morale crash in Iraq or anything near it. The last thing the grunts want is pity, which, sadly, is too often the preoccupation of Democrats.

I have found that the relatively few dissatisfied soldiers have a tendency to be more vocal and articulate. They bond with reporters more easily than other grunts, too – especially reporters who appear for short stints. The most reliable types for gauging opinion in the barracks are the quiet ones, the ones who seek to avoid journalists altogether – the ones it takes weeks to get to know.

One unassuming Marine rifle instructor from Georgia, whom I met in West Africa, e-mailed me a few months later from Iraq, where he had become the senior adviser to an Iraqi army unit on the outskirts of Fallujah during the heavy fighting there last November. He was flush with pride about the performance of the Iraqis under his command. He told me that he wouldn't have traded the opportunity of fighting in Iraq for anything.

Such warrior consciousness will intensify as the identities of the four armed services become increasingly indistinct. Rather than Army green, Air Force blue or Navy khaki, for example, the trend is toward purple – the color of jointness.

As such fusion gathers strength, the guild consciousness of the military solidifies around a combat arm's spirit to compensate for the weakening of service identity. In decades hence, the U.S. military will be less Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force, and more “purple warriors.” Military brass is comfortable with this evolution, which is also why the troops are uncomfortable with the idea of a draft. A draft would make this emerging caste less of a professional elite, with less to take pride in.

The Democrats hate the draft, too, to judge by the scare tactics they employed about the reinstitution of one in the final weeks of the 2004 election. So it should logically follow that the Democrats are comfortable with the warrior personality of the military as it is – and as it is evolving.

But that simply can't be true, given how uncomfortable the armed forces are with the Democrats, to judge by how they voted. Therefore, one has no choice but to conclude that the post-McGovern Democrats still have a fundamental problem with a fighting American military of any kind.

The degree to which the party highlighted support from political generals like Wesley Clark and John Shalikashvili at its convention – to a far more obsessive-compulsive extent than did Republicans with their political generals at their convention – was a declaration of insecurity in this regard. When the Democrats are truly comfortable with a military that fights, you'll know it from the talk in the barracks; then they won't need generals at their convention any more than Republicans do.

Another aspect of today's American military that Democrats can't be happy about is the regionalization of it. A citizen army is composed of conscripts from all classes and parts of the country in roughly equal numbers. But a volunteer military will necessarily be dominated by those regions with an old-fashioned fighting ethos that a working-class existence helps preserve.

I am referring to the Deep South and the adjacent Bible Belt of the southern Midwest and Great Plains. Marine and Army infantry units, particularly some Special Forces A-teams, show a proclivity for volunteers from the states of the former Confederacy, as well as Irish and Hispanics from poorer, more culturally conservative sections of coastal cities. Rather than a new trend, this is actually a return to the kind of military we had on the eve of World War II: a military whose warrior spirit happens to fit well with that of the Old South.

Because the Democrats see the Old South only in terms of its racist legacy, they are blind to the Confederate spirit of warrior honor that still percolates through the military. The late historian and Wesleyan University professor William Manchester was not blind to it, though. In Goodbye, Darkness, his memoir of his fighting days as a Marine in the Pacific, he pays tribute to Southerners battling the Japanese on Pacific atolls, charging “fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers.”

This Confederate warrior spirit, in turn, is linked indelibly to Christian evangelicalism, a movement defined by its emphasis on the Hebrew Bible. A stirring example is the romantic figure of Lt. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson of the Army of Northern Virginia: the reincarnation of the biblical warrior Joshua, according to historian Douglas S. Freeman in his classic Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command. Mr. Freeman depicts Jackson as someone who lived by the serenity of the New Testament and fought by the smoldering thunder of the Old. The same is true of some of America's elite ground-fighting units today, whose Christian prayer services before combat place an emphasis on readings from the Old Testament.

This religious phenomenon, because it has fortified morale at critical moments during the difficult and bloody counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq, cannot necessarily be derided as a bad thing. If Democrats cannot be comfortable with it, then they cannot be comfortable with significant segments of the military, as well as with significant segments of the electorate. Whereas the professoriate leads to the outer world and cosmopolitan Europe, where there are no votes, the military leads back into the country itself – into its very soul – where elections are always decided.

Of course, Democrats yearn to believe that the age of wars is past. But it never is, whatever we might think. Democrats have to act more like men, who can stubbornly stick it out through weeks and weeks of awful headlines – rather than brilliantly analyze everything into failure and oblivion. Obviously, it's something a woman can do, too.

---

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of “Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.” A longer version of this essay appeared in the fall issue of “The American Interest” (www.the-american-interest.com). Copyright 2005, The American Interest.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/010806dnediwarrior.5ab2a04d.html

[Moses]

The Camden Conference 2004

SPEAKER PROFILE: ROBERT D. KAPLAN




ROBERT D. KAPLAN, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the best-selling author of nine books on international affairs translated into 20 languages. His latest work is Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, about how ancient philosophy can improve critical thinking in business and foreign affairs in an age of terrorism and other non-conventional threats.

In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first American writer to warn [sic-- means advocate] in print about a future war in the Balkans. Former President Clinton and President George W. Bush are both readers of Kaplan's books, and Kaplan has briefed President Bush in the White House. Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the "best books" of 1993, and by Amazon.com as one of the best travel books of all time. The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, An Empire Wilderness, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics were all chosen by The New York Times as "notable" books of the year. In addition, An Empire Wilderness was chosen by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1998.

Kaplan is also a provocative essayist. His article, "The Coming Anarchy," in the February, 1994 Atlantic Monthly, about how population rises, urbanization, and resource depletion is undermining governments, was hotly debated in foreign-language translations around the world. So was his December, 1997 Atlantic cover story, "Was Democracy Just A Moment?" According to U. S. News & World Report, "President Clinton was so impressed with Kaplan, he ordered an interagency study of these issues, and it agreed with Kaplan's conclusions." New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls Kaplan among the four "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War (along with Francis Fukuyama, Harvard Prof. Samuel Huntington, and Yale Prof. Paul Kennedy).

Besides The Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan's essays have appeared on the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

He has been a consultant [i.e. he gets taxpayer $$$$$/defense contracts/is on their payroll, and infuses zionist agenda into US armed forces] to the U. S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, the U. S. Air Force, and the U. S. Marines. He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, major universities, the CIA, and business forums. Kaplan has delivered the Secretary of State's Open Forum Lecture at the U. S. State Department. He has reported from nearly 80 countries. An early book of his, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has recently been re-issued.

Kaplan is the recipient of the 2001 Greenway-Winship Award for Excellence in international reporting. In 2002, he was awarded the State Department's "Distinguished Public Service Award for outstanding contributions to international affairs."

[Moses]

Robert D. Kaplan


AKA Robert D Kaplan

Born: 23-Jun-1952
Birthplace: New York City

Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Journalist, Author

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Balkan Ghosts

Father: Philip Alexander Kaplan
Mother: Phyllis Quasha
Wife: Maria (one son) [Has his son volunteered to become a "warrior" in Iraq?]

    University: BA, University of Connecticut (1973)[His weak educational credentials are evident in his thinking and writing]

    (magazine:the-atlantic-monthly) Correspondent

Author of books:
Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine (1988, nonfiction)
Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990, nonfiction)
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (Apr-1993, nonfiction)
The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (Oct-1993, nonfiction)
Forgotten Crisis: The Fin de Siecle Crisis of Democracy in France (1995, nonfiction)
The Ends of the Earth, From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (1996, nonfiction)
An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future (1999, nonfiction)
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkan, the Middle East and the Caucasus (2000, travelogue)
Mediterranean Winter (2004, nonfiction)
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (2005, nonfiction)

[Moses]

www.danwei.org/ archives/001522.html

How We Would Fight China (Robert D. Kaplan - The Atlantic Monthly)

April 28, 2005




Copyright The Atlantic Monthly | June 2005

The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was…

…In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of “soft” power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America’s liberal imperium.

How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.



The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization’s end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines—a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia—the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.

The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict—an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.

The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific—and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America’s unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO’s current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO’s future lies in amphibious, expeditionary warfare…

…In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck’s imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.

Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China’s inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive—and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines—a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.

This is wholly legitimate. China’s rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people—and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War—style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM’s area of responsibility…

…The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years—idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding—will force the next American president, no matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever want to repeat—especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy military adventure would be enormous. “Getting into a war with China is easy,” says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington. “You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan—especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?”

Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. “Ending a war with China,” Vickers says, “may mean effecting some form of regime change, because we don’t want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place.” Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, “Ending a war with China will force us to substantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party’s grip on power. The world will not be the same afterward. It’s a very dangerous road to travel on.”…

…Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive, not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter), boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you don’t have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other places. China’s mixture of traditional authoritarianism and market economics has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world. And because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union’s Sakharovs and Sharanskys. Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of gray areas—Jordan and Malaysia, for example—where elements of tyranny have ensured stability and growth…

…At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy’s warships have a collective “full-load displacement” of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world’s warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy’s warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world’s thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn’t mount a rescue effort after the tsunami). The statistics go on. But as Robert Work, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, points out, at the start of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War, Athens had a great advantage over Sparta, which had no navy—but Sparta eventually emerged the victor.

China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in late June of 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Surigao Strait, in October of 1944, were the last great sea battles in American history, and are very likely to remain so. Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically, as terrorists do. In Iraq the insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry, with car bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat.

There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection—that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile’s hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers…

…What should be our military response to such developments? We need to go more unconventional. Our present Navy is mainly a “blue-water” force, responsible for the peacetime management of vast oceanic spaces—no small feat, and one that enables much of the world’s free trade. The phenomenon of globalization could not occur without American ships and sailors. But increasingly what we will need is, in essence, three separate navies: one designed to maintain our ability to use the sea as a platform for offshore bombing (to support operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan); one designed for littoral Special Operations combat (against terrorist groups based in and around Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, for example); and one designed to enhance our stealth capabilities (for patrolling the Chinese mainland and the Taiwan Strait, among other regions). All three of these navies will have a role in deflecting China, directly and indirectly, given the variety of dysfunctional Pacific Island republics that are strengthening their ties with Beijing…


…Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam’s northern tip, represents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen’s 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force’s arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.

Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM’s area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.

“This is not like Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory.” The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later…

…I have visited a number of CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we hold periodic exercises with the host country’s military, in which the base is a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive diplomatic context for getting the host country’s approval for use of the base when and if we need it.

Often the key role in managing a CSL is played by a private contractor. In Asia, for example, the private contractor is usually a retired American noncom, either Navy or Air Force, quite likely a maintenance expert, who is living in, say, Thailand or the Philippines, speaks the language fluently, perhaps has married locally after a divorce back home, and is generally much liked by the locals. He rents his facilities at the base from the host-country military, and then charges a fee to the U.S. Air Force pilots transiting the base. Officially he is in business for himself, which the host country likes because it can then claim it is not really working with the American military. Of course no one, including the local media, believes this. But the very fact that a relationship with the U.S. armed forces is indirect rather than direct eases tensions. The private contractor also prevents unfortunate incidents by keeping the visiting pilots out of trouble—steering them to the right hotels and bars, and advising them on how to behave. (Without Dan Generette, a private contractor for years at Utapao Naval Station, in Thailand, that base could never have been ramped up to provide tsunami relief the way it was.)…

…The first part of the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War. The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence…


The URL for the complete article is www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan.

[Moses]

Robert D. Kaplan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jump to: navigation, search

Robert D. Kaplan (born 1952) is a prominent but controversial American journalist currently an editor for the Atlantic Monthly. His writings have also been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications, and his more controversial essays about the nature of U.S. power have spurred debate in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. A frequent theme in his work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War. He has traveled to and reported on more than 80 countries.

Early Life

Robert Kaplan was born on 23 June 1952 in New York, the son of Philip Alexander Kaplan and the former Phyllis Quasha. Kaplan's father was a truck driver for the New York Post and instilled in Kaplan a love of history at an early age. He was accepted to the University of Connecticut due to his swimming abilty and received a B.A. in English.
[edit]


Early Career

After graduating from the University of Connecticut in 1973, Kaplan applied unsuccessfully to several big-city newsrooms but eventually found employment as a reporter for a small Vermont paper before buying a one-way plane ticket to Tunisia. He lived in Israel for several years and joined the Israeli army.[1].[THEN: As an Israeli military operative & propagandist:] He spent other parts of the decade after his graduation as a freelance journalist writing about Eastern Europe and the Middle East, living for some time in Portugal and eventually settling down in Athens, Greece, where he met his Canadian wife Maria Cabral. In 1984, he travelled to Iraq to cover the Iran-Iraq War.

He first worked as a freelance foreign correspondent reporting on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but slowly expanded his coverage to all regions ignored in the popular press. His first book, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine (1988) contended the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s was more complex than just drought and Cold War US foreign policy, pointing the blame instead to the collectivization carried out by the Mengistu regime.

Kaplan then went to Afghanistan to write about the guerilla war against the Soviet Union for Reader's Digest.[i.e. he propagandized in favor of Al Qaeda and established connections to them on behalf of Israel] Two years after writing Surrender or Starve, he wrote and published Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990) in which he recounted his experiences during the Afghanistan War.
[edit]


Rise in Fame

Neither of these books sold very well, and Kaplan's third book, Balkan Ghosts, was rejected by several editors before being published in 1993. At first, it did not sell very well. But when the Yugoslav Wars broke out, President Bill Clinton was seen with Kaplan's book tucked under his arm, and White House insiders and aides said the book convinced the President against intervention in Bosnia. Kaplan's book contended that the conflicts in the Balkans were based on ancient hatreds beyond any outside control. Kaplan criticized the administration for using the book to justify non-intervention, but his popularity skyrocketed shortly thereafter along with demand for his controversial reporting. That same year, he also published The Arabists.

Kaplan had not set out to influence U.S. foreign policy, but his work began to find a wide readership in high levels of government. Many felt that his reportage strengthened his arguments, as does his frequently-invoked historical perspective. Perhaps emboldended by his new-found influence, in 1994 and 1995 he set out to travel from West Africa to Turkey, Central Asia to Iran, and India to Southeast Asia and published a travelogue about his journey in The Ends of the Earth. He then applied his insight to his home country and traveled across North America and wrote An Empire Wilderness, published in 1998.

His article The Coming Anarchy published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1994 about how population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a threat to the developed world was hotly debated and widely translated. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Kaplan one of the "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War, along with Francis Fukuyama, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, and Yale Professor Paul Kennedy. Kaplan published the article and other essays in a book with the same title in 2000, which also included the controversial article Was Democracy Just A Moment?, and his travels through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East at the turn of the millennium were recorded in Eastward to Tartary. Also written in 2000 was another controversial essay entitled "the Dangers of Peace" in which he described an America falling under peacetime's "numbing and corrosive illusion".



After 9/11

Demand for Kaplan's unorthodox analysis became more popular after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, published shortly after 9/11, Kaplan offered the opinion that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the morality of the result rather than the morality of the means. He also published a pure travel book titled Mediterranean Winter.

Kaplan's book Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground was published in October 2005. In it, Kaplan tells of US Special Forces on the ground across the globe in Iraq, Colombia and Mongolia. Kaplan predicts that the age of mass infantry warfare is probably over and has said that the conflict in Iraq caught the U.S. Army in between being a "dinosaur" and a "light and lethal force of the future." Kaplan sees large parts of the world where the US military is operating as "injun country" which must be civilized by the same methods used to subdue the American Frontier in the 1800s. At one point he observes a Filipino and says that: "His smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism." He also praises the revival of Confederate military virtue in the US armed forces. Kaplan was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and wrote an often-cited report for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Five Days in Fallujah" about the spring 2004 campaign. In June 2005 he wrote the cover story for the Atlantic Monthly titled How we would fight China, which discusses the implications of a Cold War with China.

In addition to his journalism, Kaplan has been a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, the United States Marines, and the United States Air Force. [He's on the payroll-- and he is considered to be a journalist? He's another Judith Miller] He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, major universities, the CIA, and business forums, and has appeared on PBS, NPR, C-Span, and Fox News. He is the recipient of the 2001 Greenway-Winship Award for Excellence in international reporting. In 2002, he was awarded the United States State Department Distinguished Public Service Award.

He lives with his wife Maria and their son in Massachusetts.
[edit]


Who Praises this crap:

"Whether Kaplan draws the right conclusions from his travels, he certainly reports authoritatively on conditions in far-flung places. He has been everywhere... Certainly, Kaplan makes fresh observations." -- Rex Roberts

"Kaplan, over his career, appears to have become someone who is too fond of war. "It could be said," he has written, "that occasional small wars and occupations are good for us." He's expanded on this topic: those "occasional wars" are "evidence of humanity." This is because "peaceful times are also superficial times."" -- David Lipsky [2]

"As a piece of travel literature alone, 'The Ends of the Earth' succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking." -- Francis Fukuyama

"If Kaplan is a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary." -- Andrew J. Bacevich

"Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument--that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'--makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading." -- Michael Ignatieff

"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." -- David Rieff in The New Republic

"Kaplan offers no vision, no strategy, nothing beyond accurate descriptions of the current state of warfare inside the Gap. He is the global war on terror's best sideline reporter, but he's the wrong source to cite on how to run the entire franchise." -- Thomas P. M. Barnett

"The dire conclusion about coming anarchy seems overdrawn... Still, Mr. Kaplan's bold assertions do concentrate the mind. 'The Coming Anarchy' is informed by a rock-solid, unwavering realism and an utter absence of sentimentality." -- Richard Bernstein

"This remarkable man has found himself a large and sometimes powerful audience, and he is determined to convey some very practical, big-picture warnings to the more efficacious members of that audience before they get us all into terrible trouble. We should pay close attention, and hope for a reduced accident rate." -- Adam Garfinkle

"Because he specializes in exploring the San Andreas faults of the modern geopolitical system, his books have had more influence on politicians and policy makers than most travel writing." -- Adam Garfinkle

"Robert Kaplan is a vigorous reporter who thinks on his feet, often invoking historical perspective, but never staying still, always voraciously searching for the outlines of the future in his restless travelogues, as he calls his works." -- Suzannah Lessard

[Moses]

September 25, 2004
Human Dignity, Crazy Mike, and Indian Country

by Jim Lobe
The reason why Washington is having such a difficult time persuading others of its good faith and its good works in the "war on terror" was best illustrated Tuesday this week.

While President George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly that the U.S. belief in "human dignity" – a phrase he used no less than 10 times – was the main U.S. motivation for pursuing the war, two articles that appeared in two major U.S. newspapers the same morning offered an altogether different subtext.

The first piece, titled "Indian Country," was written by one of the administration's geo-strategic gurus, Robert D. Kaplan, and published on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Kaplan, who is writing a series of books about the U.S. military, extolled the wonders of U.S. Special Forces operating in small units from "forward operating bases" (FOBs) without direction from any "Washington bureaucracy" and outside the scrutiny of the global media.

Just like "in the days of fighting the Indians," wrote Kaplan, "the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished."

Unbeknownst to Kaplan and, presumably, to Bush, as well, the Los Angeles Times that morning was publishing a front-page article that gave one example of precisely what such a unit could do.

Based on reports by a UN team, the Washington-based Crimes of War Project, and the office of the Afghan Armed Forces attorney general, the Times described how U.S. Special Forces at one FOB in southeastern Afghanistan last year beat and tortured eight Afghan soldiers over no less than 17 days, until one of their victims, 18-year-old Jamal Naseer, died.

The eight were taken to the Special Forces FOB near Gardez on March 1, 2003, after they were seized while manning a security checkpoint amid suspicions, apparently planted by local faction leaders competing for US support, that Afghan army units in the area were selling arms to the Taliban.

According to the consistent testimony of the men, they were "pummeled, kicked, karate-chopped, hung upside down and struck repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and plastic-covered cables," the Times reported. "Some said they were immersed in cold water, then made to lie in the snow. Some said they were kept blindfolded for long periods and subjected to electric shocks to their toes."

During their ordeal, they were never given medical help or even provided with a change of clothes.

After Naseer's death, his battered body and the seven survivors were handed over to local Afghan police by a Special Forces commander who threatened to kill the police chief if he released any of the prisoners, according to an official of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), who witnessed the warning.

They were held there with as many as 13 other inmates in a "secret detention room" built for five prisoners for the next month and a half – apparently until their wounds had healed. UNAMA interviewed them during their stay there and found that their injuries were consistent with their testimony.

They were finally transferred to a prison near Kabul and released after authorities there found no evidence that they had committed any crimes or had ties to anti-government groups. The prison also referred the case to the attorney general.

The Afghan military has requested an explanation of the incident from the U.S. military authorities, according to the attorney general's report, who so far have provided no response. After the Times began inquiring about the case last weekend, the Pentagon announced that it has launched a criminal investigation.

But as of Tuesday, investigators said they did not know who precisely was running the Gardez base, other than units from the 20th Special Forces Group based in Birmingham, Ala.

Consistent with Kaplan's notion that the Special Forces should operate as independently as possible from Washington bureaucrats, however, an Army detective in Kabul told the Times, "There are no records. . . . There are no SOPs (standard operating procedures) . . . and each unit acts differently."

"Mike," the name used by the commanding officer of the FOB at the time, is a common pseudonym for intelligence and Special Forces officers working in Afghanistan, although this particular "Mike" apparently stood out for his aggressiveness, because at least one of his fellow soldiers referred to him as "Crazy Mike."

At a March 10, 2003 meeting – that is, 10 days into the victims' captivity – "Crazy Mike" attended a security meeting sponsored by UNAMA in Gardez during which he warned local Afghan commanders that he would kill any of them if they released prisoners taken by his unit.

It's unclear whether "Crazy Mike" was also the commander who threatened the local chief police with death if he released the prisoners.

The commander of the detained Afghan unit was Naseer's older brother. He testified that after Naseer's death, there was an argument between two U.S. officers during which one grabbed the other by the collar and said that Naseer should have been shot rather than tortured. One U.S. officer offered condolences and money, which was refused, according to the brother's account.

Naseer's death was never officially reported up the chain of command, so that the Pentagon's recent report in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal that a total of 39 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan now appears incomplete.

How incomplete is, of course, unknown, and the incident at Gardez may, indeed, be another case of a "few rotten apples" that the administration has tried blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

On the other hand, this latest incident – and particularly the fact that it was carried out over almost two weeks – certainly adds to the impression that abuses of detainees were indeed far more pervasive the administration has ever admitted.

Kaplan, whose 2001 best-selling book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, extolled waging war without mercy, has long argued that maintaining global order is a rough business and that even "successful" wars like those against the Indians or the U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in the Philippines a century ago inevitably lead to excesses. The extent that they can be kept out of the media spotlight – which, of course, is precisely what the Bush administration has tried to do – is all to the good, according to Kaplan's perspective. [Note that he is a "journalist"]

"'In Indian country', as one general officer told me, 'you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects,'" Kaplan wrote Tuesday.

"The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable," he went on, "but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century."

Noting that it was the great Victorian leader, William Gladstone, who called on British troops to protect "the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan," Kaplan stressed that U.S. leaders must also appeal to the idealism of their citizens in another article he wrote last year on U.S. supremacy.

"Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we [sic] weren't, our [sic] historical and geographical circumstances necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism," Kaplan wrote in the same article. "And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan."

"Speak Victorian, Think Pagan," he advised U.S. policymakers. And, thus, while the UN delegates must have heard Bush's rhetoric about "human dignity," they might have been thinking about "Crazy Mike" in "Indian Country."

(Inter Press Service)

[Moses]

"Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"
Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict
By John Brown



The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:

1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier." [Wow. Talk about expanding the noxious precept of "manifest destiny" without regard for sovereignity-- how convenient that this is so parallel to Israeli actions and frames]

As for Max Boot, he writes, "‘small wars' -- fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more typical of American history than are the handful of ‘total' wars that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting that "f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead."

2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:


"If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."



President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military might" has been compared to George W. Bush's modus operandi, noted in his "Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act" (December 8, 1830):


"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"



Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy -- seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.

3. GWOT is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put off "potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As Professor Jack D. Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:


"Bush has declared that the US will attack first before an ‘enemy' has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called ‘The Pearl Harbor strategy' since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that [Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader] Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west."




4. While U.S. mainstream thinking about GWOT enemies is that they are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics, and social organization -- there are Americans who believe that individuals in these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and thus be rendered harmless through training, education, or democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts against remaining evil-doers.

5. GWOT is fought abroad, but it's also a war at home, as the creation after 9/11 of a Department of Homeland Security illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2, 1924 that Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.) While engaged in the Indian wars, the U.S. fought on its own, without the help of foreign governments; such has essentially been the case with GWOT, despite the support of a few countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.

6. America's close partner Israel, which over the years has taken over Arab-populated lands and welcomes U.S. immigrants, can be considered as a kind of surrogate United States in this struggle. Expanding into the Middle East, the Israelis could be seen as following the example of the American pioneers who didn't let Indians stand in their way as they settled, with the support of the U.S. military, an entire continent, driven by the conviction that they were supported by God, the Bible, and Western civilization. "I shall need," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." Less eloquently, Ariel Sharon put it this way: "Everything that's grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands."

7. As for the current states that are major battlefields of GWOT, Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future, far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the U.S. proves willing to engage in the long-term garrisoning in each area -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (e.g., oil), and American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable -- will doubtless be lured there in search of economic opportunities. Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red Zone -- terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.

8. The methods employed by the U.S. in GWOT and the Indian wars are similar in many respects: using superior technology to overwhelm the "primitive" enemy; adapting insurgency tactics, even the most brutal ones, used by the opposing side when necessary; and collaborating with "the enemy of my enemy" in certain situations (that is, setting one tribe against another). What are considered normal rules of war have frequently been irrelevant for Americans in both conflicts, given their certainty that their enemies are evil and uncivilized. The use of torture is also a feature of these two conflicts.

9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq. And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

10. Perhaps because they are drawn-out wars with many fronts and changing commanders, the goals of GWOT and the Indian Wars can be subject to many interpretations (indeed, even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at one point was eager to rename the War on Terror a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"). For many abroad, GWOT is a brutal expression of a mad, cowboy-led country's plans to take over the world and its resources. In the United States, a large number of Americans still interpret these two wars as God-favored initiatives to protect His chosen people and allow them to flourish. But just as attitudes in the U.S. toward Native Americans have changed in recent years (consider, for example, the saccharine 1990 film Dances with Wolves, which is sympathetic to an Indian tribe, in contrast to John Wayne shoot-the-Injuns movies), so suspicious views among the American public toward the still-seen-as-dangerous "them" of GWOT might evolve in a different direction. Such a change in perception, however, is unlikely to occur in the near future, especially under the current bellicose Bush regime, which manipulates voters' fear of terrorists to maintain its declining domestic support.

---

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free upon request. The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.



Copyright 2006 John H. Brown

[Moses]

In November, 2005 this nation lost a great man unfortunately unknown to most of the public. His name was Vine Deloria, Jr, a renowned Native American intellect, historian, author, scholar and activist. With great eloquence Deloria spoke and wrote about how for all its existence the planet was well preserved by those who lived on it - until about 200 years ago when western technological development began and changed everything. It was then transformed from being pristine to poisoned. He expressed such great wisdom in his writings and talks, it's worth quoting. Below are some examples:

"Progress is the absolute destruction of the real world in favor of a technology that creates a comfortable way of life for a few fortunately situated people. Within our lifetime the differences between the Indian use of the land and the white use of the land will become crystal clear. The Indian  lived with his land. The white destroyed his land, he destroyed the planet earth."

Deloria once said that Christian missionaries had "fallen on their knees and prayed for the Indians" before rising to "fall on the Indians and prey on their land." He also claimed the destruction wrought by corporate values and its technology was so damaging that a return to Native American tribal standards and culture could be viewed as salvation.

He viewed a corporate run predatory society, like the U.S., as an "Adolph Eichmann of the plains", whose soldiers were tools "not defending civilization; they were crushing another society."

Deloria wrote 20 books, edited others, and published his memoirs and a two-volume set of U.S. - Native American treaties, all of which are devastating accounts of U.S. duplicity. Every treaty made was broken or ignored to this day, and the rights of our Native Indians willfully violated and trampled over through lies, deception and deceit. Just the latest example of this is in one of the accusations in the ongoing Jack Abramoff political and financial corruption scandal now making daily headlines. Abramoff, his partner, and other well-known Republicans are accused of bilking Indian casino gambling interests out of an estimated $85 million. Further, in his now disclosed emails, he referred to Native Americans as "monkeys, troglodites (people with a sub-human like nature), and idiots."

Deloria also wrote that unlike African Americans, Native Indians did not want to be equals in U.S. society. They wanted no part of it. Vine Victor Deloria, Jr., historian, scholar, activist and much more was born March 26, 1933 and died November 13, 2005. He will be missed.

link

[Moses]

What have we come to, with leaders in media, military and politics who regard this BA from UConn, who served in a foreign military, but never in our own, as a "great thinker"? And who is arranging his consulting contracts with the US military?



Appropriating the Globe