Book Review - Imperial Grunts: the American Military on the Ground
Robert Kaplan is perhaps this generation’s premier foreign policy avatar whose books are as insightful as they are a joy to read. Kaplan is known for an intense pragmatism, eschewing idealism in the interests of a realistic picture of what is taking place in a country, not what a preconceived ideology mandates you think about events. This objectivity, coupled with an understandable disdain Kaplan has for those who write about events in countries they have never seen, or have only seen from the capital city Hilton, puts him at odds with almost every foreign policy “ism” from neo-conservatism to liberal idealism.
Kaplan’s analysis is built on the back of certain ageless truths, one being an appreciation for the darker side of the human condition, and the second being that to do “good”, you may have to work with people you would otherwise prefer not to, even if over moral objections. Kaplan’s Coming Anarchy is perhaps the seminal introduction into the philosophy behind foreign policy, as approachable for the novice as it is challenging for the experienced. His other books, Surrender or Starve as just one example, manage to be not only compelling foreign policy analyses but at the same time powerful travel narratives. In Kaplan’s most recent book, Imperial Grunts, his analysis stays fixed on foreign policy matters but does so from the bird’s eye perspective of the U.S. military. Kaplan admits to sacrificing objectivity in this book (interestingly enough, the end of his book mentions that he intends this to be the first in a series on the U.S. military and its involvement in the world). A part of Kaplan’s objective is to remind the American people of the enormous good the U.S. military is capable of when given the chance; in addition, he manages to get people to look beyond the simplistic caricatures of mindless military automatons.
On balance, I thought this book was as well written in its narrative quality, but much poorer in its analysis when compared to his past books. When looking for insight into what good the U.S. military is capable of doing, Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts answers the call. However, if the reader is looking for the types of past insights Kaplan managed to introduce in his other books, in particular his unique gift for building bridges between the lessons of history and applications for today, this most recent book comes up short. I was particularly troubled by the book’s lack of an emphasis on what the policy agendas were that led the U.S. military into the various conflicts Kaplan catalogs. Where it is a possible and perhaps necessary reminder to show and remind the American public of the good being done in Afghanistan and Iraq by the military, doing so obscures the policies that led the U.S. into either country. An apologist for Kaplan may rightly suggest that this was beyond the scope of this book; Imperial Grunts certainly is limited to the U.S. military, its presence in foreign countries, its contribution, and the lessons it has learned about how to win the “hearts and minds” of the people in a country. While I appreciate this perspective, I fear that the U.S. reading public is less in need of patriotic invectives and more an objective analysis of its policies; namely, whether its emotional response to 9/11 has accommodated egregious over-reaching on both domestic and foreign policy fronts.
As just one example, threaded throughout the book are numerous examples that attempt to illustrate the military’s appreciation for its need to win over the nationals in a country and to do so through a particular code of conduct. This touchstone, something Kaplan returns to over and over, is incongruent with the Bush Administration’s torture gaffs as evidenced in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Somewhere the lessons Kaplan wishes us to believe the U.S. military has embedded within itself were cast aside in the post-9/11 world. Kaplan appears to have been forced to acknowledge this during the book’s review process as a number of footnotes exist in the book that point back to the Administration’s problems with their torture policy. It seems an odd oversight that Kaplan, the intense pragmatist and noble realist, a writer whose insight comes from personal experience coupled with intellectual wrestling, would allow the disconnect between a lesson he argues the military really understands and the implementation of policy on the part of the Bush Administration. It is in this disconnect that I found his analysis missing something – I wanted him to connect these two things in large part because, as much as I find his analysis correct and compelling, I also recognize that if he limits his perspective to the values of the military, he does so at the expense of the policies that send them into battle. Inevitably this will hurt both the foreign policy objectives they are fighting for, but will also inject them into conflicts where their sacrifice will be needless.
Another disconnect in the book is the policy predisposition of the people within the U.S. military and the policies they enact. In my estimation, Kaplan comes very close to arguing that the policies the U.S. military engages in are right and should be accommodated because the people who sacrifice for them believe they are moral and righteous. While this may be true in parts, it is a position utterly lacking in the proof-texts Kaplan’s past writing has been predicated on. It seems to me a small step to take people from a naďve belief that they should support their military because “it means well” to a true lack of objectivity that does not allow them to question their government for the very same reason. I am surprised that Kaplan’s post-9/11 and post-Iraq contribution to foreign policy is so predominantly weighted on the vantage of the U.S. military at the expense of almost any other analysis. Missing is what Kaplan devotees would have anticipated – a practical discussion of whether invading Iraq was right or not. Regardless of its rightness or wrongness, what should we do now? For all of Kaplan’s references to military theorists and manuals that discuss how to subdue an insurgency and win their hearts and minds, Kaplan’s book seems to largely side-step these thorny questions. They exist only at the periphery of his most recent work. At its worst, at times in the book Kaplan seems to echo proponents of the Bush Administration who argue “wrong implementation but right policy” or the invariably close “the ends justify the means.”
This latter point, the ends justifying the means, is an incredible tension I have loved about Kaplan’s past work that is not present in this book. Kaplan forces a reader to take their idealism (regardless of its roots in liberal or conservative ideology) with them through the realities of the situations in the countries he has traveled in and has first-hand experience within. Kaplan is best when he is forcing you through compelling narrative into a besieged world torn apart by competing warlords, and asks you what American policy should do. Should it side with the lesser of two evils? Should it do nothing? If it does nothing it is condemned for its lack of action; if it does something, necessitating a relationship with a less-than-ideal personality many times, it is attacked for its choice of the lesser of two evils. This choice is the price of the mantle of leadership and is rarely understood by political opportunists or ideological purists. I have no ideological animosity towards the military; in fact, I harbor a child-like love of the patriotic beliefs that drive people into the service as well as an equally child-like infatuation with the weapons of war. The military may not be to blame for the excesses, oversteps or mistakes of U.S. imperialism; however, by focusing only on the military’s inherent goodness, Kaplan’s analysis seems to implicitly look past the potential dangers of the policies they are charged with advancing.
What I was hoping for from Kaplan was not just a birds-eye perspective of people in the military, but a synthesis between the nexus of military service, the countries our military is engaged in, and the implications to the unique form of imperialism the U.S. currently embodies. It is impossible not to read Kaplan and be drawn in by the experiences, locations and people he is writing about; in this book he certainly rises to his traditionally excellent level of performance. What I missed in this book, when compared to his past writing, was the insight I have come to know and love. I certainly do not care if he again writes about the U.S. military; I only hope that his analysis does more than objectify the men, women and places. We have always needed writers and thinkers like Kaplan, and right now, we need his analytical capability much more than we need his travel journalism.
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November 27th, 2005 at 10:50 am
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