Books

This whole week, Seraphic Secret has been devoted to grand military theory.

And so, to continue the theme, I’ve just finished reading the best book about the war in Iraq that has yet been published: No True Glory, by Bing West. This is an eye witness account of the ferocious and bloody Battle for Fallujah by a former Assistant Secratary of Defense for International & Security Affairs under President Reagan, and more importantly a former Marine.

I’m excerpting an entire chapter because, quite frankly, I’ve never read anything that comes close to West’s description of face-to-face urban combat, between well trained US forces and fanatical Islamic gunmen.

I read the book in two sittings. I would have read it in one, but I did have to get a night’s sleep.

Buy this book. That’s my review.

It is riveting.

Seraphic Alert: The following chapter contains language that is usually not found in Seraphic Secret. I could easily edit the languge of the Marines, but I will not. So, if you are offended by foul language. Stop right here.

Chapter 27: The House From Hell

On the morning of 13 November, Kilo Company set out to clear the dense blocks of houses stretching from Phase Line Henry west to the Euphrates. Captain Jent told 1/Lt Grapes that his platoon would take the lead and Grapes assigned a block to each squad. After the previous day’s fight, the platoon was tired but excited, expecting immediate action, but the insurgents had retreated to the south and no contact was made in the first block.

The 3rd Squad began searching the second block by shooting and hammering at an unyielding lock on a courtyard gate. Admitting defeat, Corporal Ryan Weemer sat down to smoke a cigarette.

Screw this one, he thought, 2nd Squad has some C-4. They can clear it later.

Sergeant Christopher Pruitt, the Platoon Guide, ran across the street to pry open a side gate of the next house. Tough and muscular, Pruitt had a challenging nature and never relaxed.

”Hey, this gate’s open,” he yelled. “Let’s go!”

Weemer threw down his smoke and hustled over with Sergeant James Eldrige and Lance Corporals Cory Carlisle and James Prentice.

The five Marines slipped into the courtyard and Pruitt looked inside the outhouse. Fresh shit.

“They’re inside!” Pruitt whispered.

The cement house, with a dome-shaped roof and a small upper story, looked too small to hold more than a few enemy. So rather wait for a tank, the Marines decided to assault. Weemer, who had gone through the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) special training, posted Prentice as rear security and gestured to Carlisle and Pruitt to stack behind him. He slung his M16 and took out his pistol. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked down the door and charged across the room. He was “running the rabbit”, a technique where the point man rushes across the room to distract the enemy while the second man in the stack does the shooting.

As Weemer sprinted across the entryway room, he glimpsed an insurgent with an AK hiding next to the door. As he ran by, Weemer fired three rounds into the man. Carlisle burst in after Weemer, almost bumped into the gunman and jumped back, spilling into Pruitt.

“Go!” Pruitt yelled, shoving him back into the room.

Carlisle stepped forward and fired a long burst into the insurgent, who sagged to the floor. Carlisle then fired another burst into the dead man.

“Stop shooting and get over here,” Weemer yelled.

Carlisle ran across the room and flattened himself against the wall next to Weemer.

“Ready to clear?” Weemer said, gesturing at the open doorway to his left that led to the main room.

With Carlisle on his hip, Weemer charged in and was blinded by the pulsing white flashes of an AK muzzle exploding in his face. Weemer thrust out his right arm and fired eight bullets into the insurgent. The two were standing five feet apart, looking into each other’s eyes, firing furiously. Weemer could feel bullets whizzing by his face. Chips of brick and concrete were pelting him on the cheeks, his ears ringing.

Weemer was a qualified expert shot with a pistol. There was no way he had missed with a dozen bullets. He was close enough to slap the man. The man would not go down.

Weemer was running out of bullets. He shuffled towards the door, still firing, and pushed Carlisle back into the first room.

The AK rounds that missed Weemer as he made entry had passed through the door and struck Pruitt and Eldridge. Bones were shattered in the wrist of Pruitt’s firing hand and Eldridge was hit in the shoulder and chest. They staggered out of the house and Pruitt tripped and fell near the front gate. As he struggled to get up, an insurgent on the roof opened fire, the bullets kicking dirt into his face. He dove around the wall and joined Eldridge on the street.

Inside the house, Prentice, who had slid inside the doorway, saw a man wearing a green camouflage jacket and black pants rush out from a back room. Prentice fired a long burst from his SAW, hitting the man in the chest and head, killing him instantly.

Weemer turned back to Carlisle.

“Reload and we’ll finish that other fucker.”

Keeping his eyes on the doorway, Weemer patted his pistol leg-holster.

Where’s my extra mag? he thought. Fuck.

He dropped his pistol and unhooked the M-16 from his back. He heard someone stumbling towards them and backed up as the insurgent hobbled out from the main room. Weemer shot him in the legs and, when he fell, shot him twice in the face. The man, wearing black body armor over a blue denim shirt, was light-skinned, with a red bandana tied around his curly hair.

Hearing the firing and seeing the wounded, other Marines were rushing to the house. Lance Corporal Samuel Severtsgard burst into the entry room. As he had done in yesterday’s fight, Severtsgard was holding a grenade.

He nodded at Severtsgard, who pitched the grenade into the main room. Immediately after the explosion, Weemer and Carlisle rushed in. The air was filled with black smoke and the acrid smell of gunpowder. Weemer broke right and waited a moment for the dust to settle. He saw a stairwell against the left wall and quickly raised his M-16. Above him was a dome-shaped skylight and a circular catwalk with a solid, three-foot high cement guard railing. The stairs led to the catwalk.

As Weemer brought his rifle up, he saw an insurgent leaning over the cement railing, sighting in. The M-16 and the AK began firing at the same time, the sound deafening. Weemer felt his leg buckle. A hard blow rocked back his face.

To his left, Carlisle was struck down in a fusillade of bullets, the shooters taking dead aim from the catwalk overhead. Deafened by the din, Weemer hobbled back to the entryway. In the dust-filled room, he didn’t see Carlisle lying with a shattered leg and he couldn’t hear his screams.

His face numb and dripping blood, Weemer limped out to the courtyard. He had flashbacks of a jihadist his team had shot in the face a few days ago. He saw Prentice squatting next to the doorway covering the roof.

“What’s wrong with my face? How bad is it?”

Prentice barely glanced at him.

“You’re cut above the eyebrow. Its nothing.”

Weemer took off his Kevlar and found the spent bullet lodged in the webbing.

Carlisle was screaming in the main room, lying directly below the catwalk. The insurgents were using him as bait instead of killing him.

The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Jon Chandler, heard the screams and ran to the house, followed by Corporals Farmer and Sanchez. They huddled with Severtsgar
d.

” We’re gonna flood the room, OK? It’s the only way,” Chandler said. “Everyone point their muzzles up high and blast away until we can pull Carlisle out. All right, lets go! Sanchez, you’re number one man, I’ll follow.”

Farmer thought it was a good plan.” Let’s do it,” he said.

Sanchez thought, “Oh shit, here we go,” and his mind went blank—just doing, not thinking.

Severtsgard thought, Throw one grenade, then enter. He pulled a grenade from his deuce gear and thumbed the clip. Carlisle screamed again.

What am I thinking? thought Severtsgard, as he pictured Carlisle lying in the middle of the room. Hope nobody saw that.

He slipped the grenade back into its pouch.

Chandler kneed Sanchez in the buttocks to signal “GO!” and they flooded the room. Sanchez ran straight across the room. Chandler and Severtsgard broke right, aiming up at the catwalk. Farmer was the last one to the door, where he froze for a moment, trying to convince himself it wasn’t fear. A second later, a grenade landed in the middle of the room and exploded right where he would have been standing.

Farmer was blown off his feet back into the foyer. Severtsgard and Chandler disappeared in a huge swirl of dust and debris, as the deafening roar of AKs filled the main room. Chandler fell instantly, three bullets in his leg and both his shoulder and leg shredded by the grenade shrapnel. Severtsgard was also torn up, with shrapnel in his leg and foot. With one hand, he dragged Chandler from the kill zone into the kitchen.

Sanchez, who had raced across the main room, turned around and saw no one.

What the fuck? Where did they go? Sanchez thought.

In front of him was the door to a small room. Sure he was going to be shot, he kicked open the door and stepped in alone. The bedroom was empty. He propped his rifle against the wall and ran back into the main room. He grabbed Carlisle under his shoulders and pulled him into the shelter of the small back room.

Bullets were ricocheting off the walls and skipping across the floor. From behind the cement guard rail on the circular catwalk, the insurgents were darting back and forth. Their fires covered all angles of the main room below them.

In the kitchen, Chandler was howling in pain. Severtsgard had his rifle trained on the door so no one could enter and finish them off. After a minute or so, Chandler calmed down.

“Hey, man, the Corps will send us home now,” Chandler said. “We’re all messed up.”

Severtsgard smiled and kept watch on the door.

Farmer was lying on his back in the foyer, his trigger finger and thumb badly shredded with shrapnel. He couldn’t hold his rifle. He leaned against the wall and let loose a barrage of profanity.

“Fuck! Those motherfuckers! I’ll kill’em. Those fucks!”

More Marines rushed to the house. Private Rene Rodriguez stood in the courtyard for a minute to sort things out. He had seen Sergeant Pruitt stagger down the street with a shattered hand. He had seen Weemer limp out yelling for reinforcements. The platoon’s corpsman, Doc Edora, was kneeling by the wall treating Eldridge for gunshot wounds in his chest. The word was the platoon sergeant and two or three more were down inside. And his fire team leader, Cpl. Sanchez, was in there somewhere, unaccounted for.

Rodriguez grabbed Lance Corporal Michael Vanhove and ran inside.

“Corporal Sanchez! Sanchez?” Rodriguez yelled.

“I got Carlisle,” Sanchez yelled. “We’re in the front room. Watch your ass. The center room’s a kill zone!”

Rodriguez and Vanhove sprinted past Farmer, past the sprawled Iraqi bodies, the weapons, shell casings and blood. The insurgents above them opened up with a long burst of AK-47 fire. The rounds hit between the two Marines, forcing Vanhove to dive back into the foyer. Rodriguez plunged through the fire and into the bedroom with Sanchez and Carlisle.

“Take security on the door!” Sanchez said.

Sanchez had taken his pressure bandage from his shoulder pocket and was straightening Carlisle’s leg that had twisted backwards from the force of the bullets. As Carlisle screamed, Rodriguez’s stomach turned over. Sanchez spoke jokingly to Carlisle as he tried to staunch the flow of blood.

“Clean the wound, direct pressure, bandage, more pressure…just like in Doc’s classes.”

There was no back door, only a small window covered with sturdy metal bars. The insurgents were steadily shooting at the doorway.

A block away, Pruitt and Eldridge were wobbling up the street toward the medevac humvees. First Sergeant Brad Kasal from Weapons Company was walking forward next to a humvee. Kasal ran to Pruitt’s side and pulled him to cover. Pruitt was close to passing out.

“Bad guys in that house,” he mumbled. “We got people down inside.”

Kasal grabbed the three nearest Marines and ran forward to the courtyard wall, where the squad leader, Cpl. John Mitchell, was crouching with five more Marines. Mitchell led them forward and they stacked along the wall outside the door. Mitchell was in charge. Kasal considered himself just another Marine pitching in. Taking no fire, they tumbled through the doorway.

It was a new house, with clean beige dry walls and a light, brown-speckled concrete floor covered with cement dust and swaths of bright red blood. Inside the doorway, Kasal saw two dead Iraqis. Sanchez and Rodriguez were yelling for a corpsman.

“Get Doc in here!” they yelled. “Carlisle’s bleeding out!”

The insurgents knew the Marines had to move across the main room to get their casualties out, and from the catwalk they had an ideal field of fire. Joining Mitchell inside the house were First Sergeant Kasal, Private First Class Nicoll and Lance Corporal Morgan McCowan. For Kasal and Nicoll, this was their second day fighting side-by-side. After four years of service, Niccol was still a Private First Class, repeatedly busted by Kasal. In a battle of wills, Kasal had called PFC Niccol into his office nine times for fighting, drinking and tardiness.

Niccol’s irreverence was legendary. On the eve of the battle for Fallujah, the battalion commander, LtCol Willie Buhl, gave him the microphone to motivate 900 Marines with his “I AM PFC NICOLL!” speech, a parody of Mel Gibson’s “I am William Wallace!” exhortation in the movie Braveheart.

“Niccol, you’re with me,” Kasal said. “Cover my back.”

The firing had died down. Mitchell, a school-trained medic, decided not to hesitate.

“I’ll go across,” he said. “You all cover me.”

Mitchell ran across the main room in a dead sprint to reach Sanchez, attracting only a few scattered shots. Kasal and Niccol stepped into the main room, staying close to the wall. Kasal looked at the stairs to his right leading to the second floor. Midway up, it looked like someone had chopped a peephole a foot wide out of the cement wall. He next noticed a small room the left of the room Mitchell had entered.

“Anyone been in that room to the left?” he shouted.

When no one answered, Kasal grabbed two Marines behind him.

“Cover that mouse hole and the ladder well,” he said. “Niccol, we’ll clear that room to the left.”

Kasal kicked open the door and thrust the barrel of his rifle forward, sweeping or “pieing” the room from right to left, ending his two-second scan with his eyes locked on the muzzle of an AK pointed at his nose. The insurgent had been hiding inside the door next to the light switch.

Instead of shooting right away, he yelled in Arabic, then fired. In that instant, the shocked first sergeant had jumped a foot back and the AK rounds streaked by, hitting the wall. Kasal stuck his rifle barrel over the top the AK barrel and pulled the trigger, sending ten bullets into the man’s chest. T
he thickset man, dressed in a khaki shirt with a black chest rig holding a row of AK magazines, slowly slumped to the floor. Kasal pushed back the insurgent’s sand-colored helmet and, not wanting to be killed by a dying man, shot him twice more in the head.

Without looking behind him, Kasal shouted over his shoulder “Cover that ladder well!” and stepped forward to look around the small bathroom a second time. As he did so, bullets hit the wall around him and he felt like someone had hit his legs with a sledgehammer. He fell into the doorway and was hammered again. He started to crawl around the corner, then remembered Niccol was in the open behind him.

Lying on his side, Kasal looked back and saw Niccol propped against a wall. Niccol jerked and winced as the bullet s hit him, shoving his hand under his armored vest. When he pulled it out, it was covered with blood. Lying on his stomach, Kasal reached up and grabbed Niccol by the sleeve, pulling him down. As he did so, he felt a baseball bat hit him across the ass and he knew he had been shot again.

The insurgents had held their fire, then sprung their ambush. The firing went on and on, Kasal estimating it continued for thirty seconds. Why did those Marines take their eyes off that damn mouse hole, he wondered.

Kasal pulled Niccol to his left into the room. He propped Niccol’s shattered left leg on his stomach, trying to tie a pressure bandage as a tourniquet. His hands were sticky with blood and he kept fumbling, worrying that Niccol was going to bleed to death due to his clumsiness. He heard a thump to his right and turned his head to see a pineapple grenade laying just out reach. He rolled left on top of Niccol and bear-hugged him as the explosion went off. He felt sharp pressure in his legs and buttocks and knew he had been hit again. When his head stopped ringing, he shoved his rifle out the door so the Marines would know which room they were in. He didn’t want to be hit by friendly fire and he knew they would be coming for them.

Down the hall, Mitchell heard Nicoll yell, “I’m hit!” and First Sergeant Kasal yell, “Get that goddamn cocksucker!”

“Is Nicoll OK?” Mitchell shouted. “Is he going to die?”

Sanchez felt his stomach turn over again. Nicoll was one of his best friends. He couldn’t die. This was all wrong. They had to get them out of there.

Mitchell told Sanchez to take care of Carlisle. Without a word, he ran out of the room, hugging the wall as he sprinted for the bathroom. A grenade bounced and exploded behind him and several AKs started firing. One round hit Mitchell’s rifle in the chamber. Another ricocheted off of his weapon and tore into his thigh—his third Purple Heart.

He skidded into the bathroom. Kasal lay on his side to let Mitchell attend to Niccol in the cramped space. As the blood dripped from him, Kasal’s blood pressure fell and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he jerked back, he yelled at Niccol to stay awake. Niccol was nodding off for minutes at a time, then muttering that he was OK.

“Get him out,” Kasal said, “or he’ll bleed to death.”

Outside, Lieutenant Grapes ran up to the house as Pruitt, Eldridge, Weemer and Farmer were being helped into medevac humvees. Over a handheld radio, Grapes reached Mitchell.

“Find us another way out,” Mtichell said, “or to kill those fucks so we can walk out!”

Corporal Wolf, who had bandaged Mitchell’s arm in the fight the day before, pushed into the entryway next to Grapes and started shouting to Mitchell.

“I got to get over there man! You’re my boy! I’ve gotta come over there!”

Grapes and Wolf circled the house and found no other doors. The five windows had one-inch steel bars covering them.

“Where are they firing from?” Grapes asked Mitchell over the radio.

“There’s a ladderwell, and a skylight over the living room. At least one of them is on the roof!”

“All right,” Grapes told Wolf, “you get your team ready to pull them out. I’ll put shooters on the roof across the street to suppress those guys. Once I give you the signal, get in there and pull them out.”

Wolf agreed. While Wolf put together his rescue team, Grapes led a heavily-armed squad onto the roof.

Sgt. Byron W. Norwood, who commanded a humvee with a .50 caliber, entered the foyer with Wolf to see how he could bring the heavy gun to bear. Formerly a crewmember on Colonel Toolan’s humvee, Norwood came from a small town in Texas. His sharp wit had reminded Toolan of New York City-type humor. Norwood poked his head around the doorway just as an insurgent let loose a burst. Rodriguez, guarding the door to the bedroom, saw Norwood peek into the main room and watched as his eyes suddenly grew wide. The bullet hit Norwood in the forehead, killing him instantly. Wolf was hit in the chest by the same burst and fell back unharmed, a bullet lodged in his armor vest.

Seeing the expression on Norwood’s face terrified Rodriguez. I’m gonna be the next one shot, he thought. Rodriguez asked Sanchez to relieve him in the doorway.

The Quick Reaction Force, a squad from Lieutenant John Jacobs’ 2nd Platoon, arrived on the scene. Within seconds, Jacobs had his Marines maneuvering to bring fire on the insurgents.

On the nearby roof, the Marines with Grapes poured fire toward the skylight. They were at the same height, though, and the bullets were passing over the heads of the insurgents. With the wounded inside, throwing grenades or bringing heavy weapons into play was out of the question. Wolf couldn’t push across the main room without better suppression.

Chandler and Severtsgard, trapped in the kitchen, thought they could batter their way through a padlocked metal panel leading to the entryway. After shooting and hammering at the panel for several minutes, they pried it open and squeezed through. Wolf laid down suppressing fire and they staggered through the entryway and out into the courtyard.

Both were bleeding badly. Chandler was howling in pain, his leg twisted in a spiral fracture from hip to foot. Severtsgard slumped down against the courtyard wall, blood pouring from his fractured foot. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum came to his aid. Tatum, who had the thickest pair of glasses in Kilo Company, offered to remove Severtsgard’s torn boot.

“Go to hell you blind fuck! No way you are working on my foot!” Severtsgard yelled, getting to his feet and limping toward the nearest humvee.

Grapes and Jacobs knelt by the wall to plan what to do next. Five Marines were trapped inside. Rifle fire wasn’t budging the insurgents hiding behind the cement wall on the catwalk above the main room and Mark 19 fire or hand grenades would injure the trapped Marines.

“Flashbangs! The insurgents will think they’re grenades and duck,” Grapes said.

Jacobs led his men to the entryway, flipped in two flashbangs and rushed in firing. The insurgents immediately returned fire. Stalemate.

Back outside, Grapes, Crossan and Pvt Justin Boswood crept up to a bedroom window in the back of the house. Grapes and Boswood took turns on a sledge hammer, hammering at the steel bars. Grapes could hear his wounded Marines wailing in pain inside. He could hear Mitchell yelling, “Get us the fuck out of here!” After smashing and smashing, they pried two bars slightly apart. They stripped off their armor and gear and squeezed through. Marines handed their weapons to them.

Boswood pulled a dead insurgent’s body out of the doorway, the blood from his skull covering the floor. Grapes slid on his back into the main room, his sights fixed on the skylight above. Boswood knelt over Grapes chest, covering the stairs.

Grapes, Jacobs and Sanchez at last had the catwalk in a three-cornered crossfire.

“Ready?” Grapes yelled. “Fire!”

From three angles, the Marines
fired up at the crosswalk, forcing the insurgents to duck behind the wall.

Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Jonathon Schaffer sprinted across the kill zone, grabbed Kasal and dragged him back to the entryway. Then they ran back and brought out Niccol. Then Mitchell.

That left Sanchez, Rodriguez and Carlisle in the back bedroom down the hall.

The Marines could either continue running the gauntlet across the main room or get through the bars over the bedroom window. Corporal Richard Gonzalez, a demolitions expert known as “the mad bomber,” suggested blowing the bars off the window.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Sergeant Jose Nazario yelled. “You’ll fucking kill them! Don’t blow it!”

Corporal Eric Jensen came running up with a long chain that was looped around the bars. Jensen hooked the chain to a Humvee and pulled out the bars. Sanchez and Rodriguez put Carlisle on a makeshift stretcher and passed out his limp body.

With all the wounded out of the house, Grapes linked up with Mitchell.

“Now we let Gonzalez do his work,” Grapes said.

The Marines peppered the house with fire and hooted and hollered as if they were still inside while Gonzalez prepared a 20 pound satchel charge – sufficient to blow down two houses. Gonzalez crept inside the house and placed the satchel on top of a dead insurgent’s body. A few seconds later, he ran outside.

“15 Seconds!”

They ducked for cover. The house exploded in a huge flash of red, followed by chunks of concrete thudding down as a vast cloud of dust rose. A pink mist mixed with the dust and gunpowder in the air. Grapes was happy to see it.

The Marines waited several minutes, then moved forward into the dusty rubble. They saw two bodies lying among the slabs. As they drew closer, they noticed one of them move.

“They’re still alive!”

An arm flicked limply forward and a grenade tumbled toward the Marines. They turned and ran for cover. Sanchez saw Grapes and Crossan racing by him. I’m too slow! I’m fucked! he thought. The grenade went off, injuring no one.

Seven Marines climbed back up the rubble and fired two hundred rounds into the two insurgents. Among the detritus, Lt. Grapes found a woolen winter skullcap with bright colors, the kind worn by fighters in Chechnya. He kicked it into the dirt.

Bing West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in Marine infantry in Vietnam. His books have won the Marine Corps Heritage Prize, the Colby Award for Military History and appeared on the Commandant’s Reading List. West appears regularly on The News Hour and Fox News. He is a member of St. Crispin’s Order of the Infantry and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Newport, RI.

All original content is © 2005-2006

I have just finished reading one of the most important and depressing books I have ever read, The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. The subtitle of this superb volume is: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, A History of 50 Years of Independence.

The portrait of Africa that Meredith so meticulously draws makes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness look like, well, an MGM musical

As the European Colonial powers withdrew from Africa, dozens of new states were born. There was much hope and celebration–and of course zillions of dollars in foreign aide was pumped into these fledging states.

Independence came in the midst of a massive economic boom. These lands were and are rich in natural resources–which is why the Europeans colonized Africa in the first place.

But one by one, each state devolved into vicious thugocracies. Nkrumah of Ghana, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Hastings Banda of Malawi, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Empire…

The rogues list is endless. These corrupt thugs all ran their countries as personal fiefdoms, looting and bankrupting the national treasuries, murdering all opposition, and setting up socialist governments that doomed their citizens to lives of wretched poverty and endless disease.

And which country do you think was propping up these vile regimes, America, Russia?

Nope.

France.

If you’re looking for a truly evil colonial hand propping up one murderous regime after another, well it’s those elegant, self-righteous Frenchman.

And you don’t have to go back very far to find their bloody handprints. As recently as the genocide in Rwanda, the French are in the thick of it. The French army trained the Hutu genocidaires. In essence, the French helped the Hutu murder 800,000 Tutsi.

Hey, let’s not forget that it was the French who rounded up the Jews in France without one Nazi taking part in the round-up. It was French policeman all the way on Black Saturday. Yup, the French have a talent for collaborating with facist regimes with genocidal plans. But then they crap all over America, get all uppity when we actually try to do some good in the world.

Finally, the genocide–it was not a civil war, but meticulously planned butchery–in Rwanda was too much of an embarrassment for the French and Mitterand tore himself away from his mistress for a few hours and sent in “peace keeping troops.” It was called Operation Turquoise.

Meanwhile, the French were still delivering arms to the Hutu muderers.

Radio broadcasts in Rwanda told the Hutu women: “You Hutu girls wash yourselves and put on a good dress to welcome our French allies. The Tutsi girls are all dead…”

French troops on the ground, disgusted by the evidence of massacres they found felt betrayed. “We have been deceived,” said a sergeant-major, staring at a group of wounded and starving Tutsi refugees. “This is not what we were led to believe. We were told the Tutsis were killing the Hutus. We thought the Hutus were the good guys and the victims.”

“I’ve had enough of being cheered by murderers, ” remarked another soldier.

A French officer broke down and cried, so appalled was he at the crimes committed by men he had trained.

Meredith does not take the easy way out. He does not lay blame at the legacy of colonialism. If anything, the colonial powers left these countries with strong infrastructures with which to build upon.

No, if there is any great blame it can be found in the tribal loyalties that subvert all other interests. The states that were carved out by the colonial powers were truly artificial. For Africans, it is always family, clan, and tribes that come first.

Ask most Africans about his or her nation and you will get a puzzled stare.

I cannot close without mentioning one of West Africa’s most notorious warlords, Charles Taylor. After laying waste to Liberia using child soldiers, murdering, torturing, committing unspeakable atrocities, he set up “elections.”

His 1977 campaign slogan was the truly catchy: He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.

He won.

Oh, and guess who gave his seal of approval to Taylor’s election?

Former President Jimmy Carter. As always, utterly useless.

The book was carelessly shtupped in the “just returned” shelf. I was browsing this shelf in my local library when the title caught my eye: Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel 1890-1933.

I checked it out, expecting the usual photos of Christian holy places, Arabs on camels–G-d I hate camels, they spit and bite and smell like you know what–and photos of dunes, lots of sand dunes.

Wrong.

This book and its contents are a complete knock-out. And for a Jew and a lover of Zion, well, a complete revelation.

To quote from the flap: Documentors of the Dream is the first comprehensive book to chart the origins and development of Eretz Israel as seen through the eyes of Jewish photographers and their images are largely unknown and unpublished in the world of photographic history. It is a curious fact that Israel, the embodiment of a culture, language, and history, a symbol of nationhood for Jews, almost never appears in photographs of the Holy Land. Most photographs of the period reflect a predominantly Christian world in a period of colonial expansion. Documentors of the Dream is a stunning and beautiful testament to an emerging art form and the emerging nation it captured.

After I inhaled the photographs in this book I gave it to Karen and begged her to look at it. Usually, Karen isn’t all that interested in my art books. She’s busy reading all these psychology papers that I find, frankly, incomprehensible. But she sensed that this time there was something different about the book I was offering and dutifully she set about going through it with her usual care and rigor. The next day Karen said to me: “The pictures in the book are just amazing. It’s Israel before any sleaze set in.”

You think you know what Israel looked like back before statehood? Look at the photo taken of Rav Kook with Rabbi Harlap in The Mercaz haRav Yeshiva, Jerusalem, in the 1930’s, by the incomparable photographer Tzadok Bassan, pg.105.

Deeply touching are Avraham Soskin’s intimate photos of British and Palestinian WWI servicemen. Note that the Palestinians in Palestine are always Jews. The Arabs are always called, well, Arabs, never Palestinians. It’s a triumph of PR, actually a triumph of the big lie, that the Arabs have coopted the name Palestinians for they never referred to themselves as anything but Arabs until recently.

How did Israel let them get away with that?

Who said Jews are smart?

But I digress.

If you love somebody and you’re looking for the perfect gift to give, well, this is it. A beautiful and illuminating art book that has amazing pictures you can look at again and again, and text that just never fails to astonish. This fine volume was published back in 1998, but you know what, it gets my nod for the best art book of 2005.

The other night, I dreamed of Ariel and woke drenched in a cold sweat. I got out of bed, went downstairs and made myself a cup of tea. In the living room, I sat in the Eames chair where Ariel spent most of the last year of his life learning, reading, talking to people. Making believe that Ariel was looking over my shoulder, I slowly leafed through the book, pausing at the photos of the Rebbeim and the Hasidim–the photos I knew Ariel would take particular pleasure in.

We spent the longest time on page 53 with Tzadok Basson’s portrait of a Jerusalem Hasidic family: The noble and handsome patriarch Israel Shimon Schein Azulai with his two grandsons, Avrech Azulai and Chaim Yosef. Beautiful children with light–holy light–coming directly from their eyes.

The Case for Peace: How The Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved
by Alan Dershowitz. John Wiley & Sons Hardcover $22.95

The day this book arrived in my mail box a homicide bomber murdered five Jews in Hadera, Israel.

The day this book arrived in my mail box the President of Iran informed the world that the “Zionist entity” — he does not say Israel — should be wiped off the face of the earth.

The day this book arrived in my mail box I finished reading a detailed narrative of the great Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March through Georgia.

Professor Dershowitz is an eloquent defender of Israel. In fact, this book should have been titled: The Case For Israel II, a sequel to his previous book The Case for Israel. I say this because the moment this book rolled off the presses — it was irrelevent.

You see, Professor Dershowitz’s thesis is that with the death of the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, the dynamics in the Middle East changed. “A season for peace may be on the horizon,” says Dershowitz.

Dershowitz’s plan for peace is, for the most part, Oslo redux.

With great elegance, and great naivete, Professor Dershowitz identifies twelve geopolitical barriers to peace, and he explains how to move around them and push the process forward.

Just like that.

As if terrorists were not in complete control of Palestinian society.

Dershowitz is fearfully logical. But his logic forces him to confront some pretty uncomfortable truths. For instance, he has a whole chapter titled: What if a Palestinian State Became a Launching Pad for Terrorism?

Guess how long the chapter is? A hundred pages? Fifty pages? Ten pages?

Sorry, it’s three pages long, er, short.

Okay, so the very idea makes Professor Dershowitz, uh, lose sleep. It should. Palestinian society is basically a gruesome death cult. Their media is saturated in the most vile anti-Semitism you have ever seen. Local governments are nothing but self-serving thugocracies. Kidnapping and shakedowns are the only growth industries in Gaza. Imagine a state run by the Corleone family and you get a pretty good idea of Palestinian culture.

And don’t fool yourself, the PA does not really exist. The PA at this point is merely a political illusion propped up by the western press.

The real power lies with the clans and the tribes. They are the ones who always run things in Arab society. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know the Arab world.

Which is why Israel is buiding the security fence. There is no partner for peace. At least Hamas is honest: they call for the complete destruction of Israel. Ditto for Hezbollah. Ditto for Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Ditto for Islamic Jihad. Ditto for Black September. Ditto for — well you get the point.

Of course any Palestinian state that arises (Gosh, there’s a depressing thought) will be a terrorist state; that’s all they’ve ever planned for. That’s all they know: to destroy, not to build. It’s so much more fun to run around with a Kalachnikov and give interviews to Paris Match than to provide social services. I mean who wants to pick up the garbage?

So, how does Professor Dershowitz resolve this existential question of a possible, no probable terrorist state?

I quote: Until and unless that frightening scenario is addressed, with concrete guarantees from the international community, it is likely that distrust among moderate Israelis will persist… Only the United States, with the cooperation of European nations, could provide the needed guarantees.”

Yup, you read correctly: international community.

Like whom, France, Germany? Hey, how about that other great European power…Belgium?

Professor Dershowitz’s unfortunate refrain of “international guarantees” appears again and again in the pages of this book.

I know one person who probably really likes that whole notion: Kofi Annan.

It’s really depressing.

At this point in the book, I badly wanted a drink, something really strong — except I don’t drink. Liquor gives me migraines. So I had a cup of coffee instead.

It’s absolutely lunatic, if not downright suicidal. No nation is going to place her security in the arms of another country.

Let me say this: Dershowitz does a wonderful job of arguing Israel’s case. No one does a better job. It’s particularly gratifying to see him shredding the academic anti-Semites like Tony Judt of NYU and Noam Chomsky of MIT.

But, his arguments for peace are about as dead as Arafat.

Oh, Sherman’s March through Georgia?

That was the nail in the coffin of the Confederacy. You see, the civilians who lived in the South did not suffer any real consequences for their deplorable life-style. Sure, they sent their sons and fathers off to war. They rationed food. Good coffee was hard to find. And their slaves were getting kind of surly. But all in all, life was, well, livable.

Until Sherman’s well disciplined army came marching through. He burned their plantations. He ripped apart their corrupt society.

He made them understand that support for evil has a fearful price.

And guess what, the South capitulated once the civilian population got a taste of real suffering.

And then there was peace.

Here’s an interview with Robert Kaplan, author of the invaluable Imperial Grunts. Thanks so much to Steve Finefrock for sending it to me.

Kaplan is one of the few working journalists who actually bothers to live with our soldiers, and not in four star hotels. He knows them intimately. He loves them; hence he gets war right.

Kaplan understands journalistic elites, and geopolitics. Read this interview in its entirety. It is highly revealing.

Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan

Born in Brooklyn 53 years ago, Robert Kaplan was raised in a working-class section of Queens where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker. Recruited as a swimmer, he attended the University of Connecticut, where he took not a single history, economics, or political science course, but learned to write. He started in journalism at the Daily Herald of Rutland, Vermont, and commenced to energetically educate himself in world affairs.

A vagabond investigator of some of the world’s most troubled regions, he has written a host of books on places like the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. Reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s, he was one of the first journalists to profile contemporary Islamic radicals. His latest book, Imperial Grunts, is a ground-level portrait of American infantrymen serving around the globe.

Robert Kaplan was interviewed in Washington, D.C. by TAE’s editors.

TAE: Tell us how you got started writing about some of the world’s most benighted places.

Kaplan: Starting not long after college, I spent 16 straight years overseas living out of cheap hotels and youth hostels as a freelance reporter, sending in stories by mail and yellow telex tapes. I spent lots of time in North Africa and the Middle East, and two years embedded with the Israeli military. In 1988, I had my first book published. And then it just went from there.

Today, I live in western Massachusetts, mainly because of the solitude it provides. The more isolated a writer’s environment, the more powerful and honest the results—because writing, above all, is ferocious truth telling. And each year, I spend about six months overseas.

TAE: What draws you to the topics of war and ferment in which you’ve specialized?

Kaplan: I’m very curious. And travel is more than just going to different places. All too often, people who travel all over the world only socialize with elites like themselves. For me, that’s not travel. Travel requires getting to another socioeconomic class than the one you inhabit. And that means getting away from stable places with very affluent business communities and getting to war-torn places where you have to make a sociological and cultural adjustment.

I also find that places on the brink of collapse are intellectually fascinating because they’re like a real-life experiment with Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Ibn Khaldun. You can’t really understand Hobbes unless you’ve been to Sierra Leone when it’s cracking up. Hobbes once said that “life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And he’s exactly right, because freedom is nothing without authority. That concept has no real meaning in the classroom unless you’ve seen a place with no authority—where just walking down the street is absolutely terrifying. That’s why the most fundamental human right is personal security. That’s something that is very hard to communicate to people who’ve never been outside of an affluent, physically secure environment.

TAE: For all the talk of American imperialism, isn’t the main “foreign influence” in Iraq today—the main outside threat to Iraqi self-determination—the international jihadis who make up the al-Qaeda resistance?

Kaplan: Absolutely. One of the big myths of the Left is that we have troops around the world propping up dictatorships. This reflects a 1970s time-warp mentality. In every case I can name—from the Philippines to Georgia, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East—we’re stationed at the request of newly elected, internationally recognized, democratic governments. And this makes sense: You can’t have a stable democracy without a professional military.

If the United States were to pull out of Iraq you would have a real bloodbath, plus a reversal in a lot of the positive trends towards liberalization we’ve seen in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Dubai, and many others. I mention all these places individually because they’re not getting enough coverage in the media. Even Syria—despite all the trouble we’re having—is a much less autocratic place now than it was four years ago. None of this would have been possible if the United States had cut and run Mogadishu-style once things got rough in Iraq.

TAE: Is it plausible that the elections and constitutions and various liberalizations now taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan are inspiring a kind of “Arab Spring” in the places you just mentioned?

Kaplan: Yes. Three weeks after the first successful Iraqi election, Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt stunned the world by saying “this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.”

But because we’ve had such a surge of democratization in the Arab world in such a narrow frame of time, we’re going to have to stick it out in order for the progress to hold. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Lebanese democracy is just ephemeral; the Syrians will ultimately reconstitute Lebanon in their own totalitarian image. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Libya will go backward after going forward, and in Egypt Mubarak will be succeeded by another Brezhnev-type leader. And on and on.

TAE: What are the chances that the strong underground forces for freedom that are bubbling in Iran will push aside that nation’s theocracy in the next ten years?

Kaplan: I used to be optimistic. In the mid-1990s I saw an Iranian counterrevolution as the biggest coming surprise. But I was wrong. At this point, the theocracy is a system with divisions of power that are very well entrenched, and hard to overthrow.

And Iran is not Iraq—we couldn’t just go in there and topple it. There’ll be a slow evolution at some point, but I think the reality is that as long as we’re overextended in Iraq, we have to try to get as far as we can in Iran together with our allies. And only when the Iranian regime crosses a line in the sand with regard to their nuclear development should we—or will we—take any action.

TAE: Have you spent enough time with Iraqis recently to have drawn any conclusions on their current state of mind?

Kaplan: I think there’s a large, silent majority in Iraq whose worst nightmare is that we’ll leave abruptly. They don’t want us there with 140,000 troops, but they don’t want us to leave either. They essentially want what the Administration and responsible Democrats [?] want—a gradual takeover by their own forces over a few years.

TAE: If we gave you only two options, would you say that over the last three years in Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. has achieved more than we should have expected, or less than we should have expected?

Kaplan: In Afghanistan we’ve achieved more than we should have expected. You have to compare today’s Afghanistan to the high-water mark of its own governance in the 1950s and 1960s under King Zahir
Shah. Even then, the government did not control the whole country and did not extend its writ into villages and towns. By that standard, we’ve achieved a lot more than anyone could have expected. And among the Afghan people, there’s relatively little anti-Americanism.

In Iraq, we’ve achieved a lot more than we have in Haiti or Kosovo—but still achieved less than we should have expected. My litmus test for Iraq is the flak jacket. As long as we still have to wear flak jackets all the time, then we’re not where we need to be.

TAE: How rapidly should U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq over the next few years, and what should the criteria be?

Kaplan: First of all, I don’t believe in a timetable. Troops should only be withdrawn as rapidly as the situation allows. And when we do pull down the number of troops—which we will—it’s important to get the political body language right. We cannot seem as if we’re cutting and running.

When Prime Minister Barak of Israel withdrew from Lebanon, for example, he got the political body language wrong. That resulted in the Palestinians misunderstanding his actions, and it became a significant cause of the first intifada. The Israeli prime minister was right to withdraw, but it wasn’t couched in the right phrases with the right context. So we have to be very careful about our withdrawal.

TAE: We hear much in the establishment media about morale problems in U.S. military ranks, and reporters often seek out disenchanted troops to put in front of microphones. Have you encountered widespread morale problems among American fighters in Iraq?

Kaplan: Absolutely not. I’ve only met two kinds of soldiers in the combat arms community: Those who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and those who are pulling every bureaucratic string to get deployed there.

I spent the summer of 2004 with a group of marines in Niger and sub-Saharan Africa, and every marine in that platoon was trying to get to Iraq. A few months later, one of them got lucky and ended up leading Iraqi forces into combat in the second battle of Fallujah. He was a sergeant from Georgia, and after the battle, he sent me a long e-mail flush with pride. And that’s not just a cutesy-pie story—that’s basically what I encounter all the time.

The only disenchantment is found in the Reserves and the National Guard, mainly because they signed up for a short time and end up serving many months. That’s a system that needs reform. But generally speaking, morale is better than it’s been in a very long time.

Keep in mind there is very little combat going on now. Most deployments feature more humanitarian missions than combat. Even in Iraq, the troops really have to search far and wide to find combat activities.

TAE: How do our soldiers understand for themselves, and explain to others, the value of the work they are doing in Iraq?

Kaplan: Soldiers are very aware of why they’re fighting—and that awareness stems from their own practical day-to-day experience, which is not killing people. By and large, they’re rebuilding, patrolling, and helping the Iraqi people.

Second, it’s important to realize that most soldiers don’t sit around discussing abstract questions like whether or not we should’ve intervened. They do, however, take policy and command directives, break them down, and then argue, complain, and fervently discuss them.

Since the dawn of time, the most popular hobby amongst soldiers has been complaining at night in the barracks. If you don’t hear complaints, then you know morale is bad—because that means people are silent. And I think that many journalists misconstrue this, because they don’t understand—and they haven’t read the history of—barracks life.

TAE: As in any institution with millions of members, there are rogue soldiers—and today we know their names and faces very well, as with Lynndie England. At times this has threatened to paralyze our war on terror. How common are rogue soldiers, compared to soldiers who do the right thing?

Kaplan: They’re statistically infinitesimal. This is the most disciplined, restrained military the U.S. has ever had, under more scrutiny than it’s ever had. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Nothing was a greater privilege in my professional life than being with 18- and 19-year-old marines as they turned into restrained adults the minute that combat commenced. To say that we shouldn’t give our soldiers authority is like saying we shouldn’t fly planes because they occasionally crash.

TAE: Have you talked to any of the troops about their feelings on Abu Ghraib?

Kaplan: Yes, and there are several levels to this. First and foremost, every soldier I’ve talked to has wanted to scream, “What were those idiots thinking? Who were their commanders? They should all be put in prison because they’ve besmirched our name! And even though 99 percent of what we do is good, nobody is writing about it because of these few idiots!”

That’s the first level. The other level is that after about six weeks of blanket coverage, they started disliking the media. They knew that the first few days of coverage were legitimate, because this was a terrible abuse. But after a few weeks, when the new revelations became smaller and smaller and less and less significant, the continuing blanket coverage obscured the great work that the U.S. Army was doing.

At that time, for example, they were involved in very restrained, close-quarters urban combat in Karbala, fighting that made Black Hawk Down look easy. Yet very little was written about it. And that’s when I heard soldiers start saying that the media was part of the problem.

TAE: You argue in your new book that evangelical Christianity has played an important role in making the U.S. military more moral, more disciplined, and more discerning. Explain that for our readers.

Kaplan: After Vietnam, one of the many motors that helped transform our military into a disciplined organization capable of complex exercises was the resurgence of religion. Perhaps most importantly, religious Christianity cut down on drinking and misbehavior. That in turn weakened the lure of the officers’ clubs, which narrowed the barrier between officers and enlisted and non-coms. I attended quite a number of religious services during my reporting for Imperial Grunts, and I never found them intimidating, proselytizing, or coercive. And the religion bucked up morale during difficult moments.

TAE: Is Islam a religion of peace, or is there is a bellicose spirit right at the heart of Islam?

Kaplan: Islam is a religion that’s willing to fight. It’s a great religion for poor, downtrodden people, and there are so many around the world. It’s direct. It’s stark. It’s in a specific language. The Koran has fewer ambiguities than other religious texts. In a way, it’s very populist. It actively proselytizes. And even though I wouldn’t call it a war-like religion, it can adjust itself to war more easily than others. But Old Testament-oriented Christianity can also do that. The Old Testament is all fire and brimstone, while the New Testament is more milk and honey. And evangelicals put a significant emphasis on the Old Testament.

TAE: Where are the moderate Muslims today? Why don’t we hear more from them after outrages are committed in the name of Islam?

Kaplan: I think they’ll be more outspoken if we can stick it out in Iraq. Look at the fact that some Sunnis were bombing mosques during Ramadan. How come nobody’s protesting in the Arab world? But once ou
r success is assured, I think they’ll speak up.

Meanwhile, we do have Ayatollah Sistani. If Nobel Peace Prizes actually went to people who deserved them, it would have gone to him this year. Sistani exercised tremendous enlightened restraint in the face of so much violent provocation, and he really kept his community together. I do think we’ve gotten lucky with the Shiite leadership in southern Iraq.

TAE: You’ve argued that Democrats will not be trusted to wield the sword of U.S. national defense so long as a fierce U.S. combat soldier who draws inspiration from the Bible is something that makes them uncomfortable. Why are the Democrats seen as so weak on national security, and will that change?

Kaplan: Look at last year’s election, which, to a certain extent, was a referendum on the Iraq war. More than 70 percent of active-duty military personnel, Reserve, and Guard voted for the Republicans. And from my anecdotal experience—which was with the front line infantry and the Special Forces, who have always been more conservative—the Republicans probably received more than 90 percent of the vote.

With numbers like those, you have to ask yourself why. It wasn’t for policy reasons; a lot of people in the barracks will openly say that Bush and Rumsfeld made a number of mistakes. It was cultural. People in the military don’t feel like the Democrats are one of them. They feel as if the Democrats are from another America—from the same America as the elite media.

So the Democrats have a cultural hurdle to overcome, and it’s essential for the well-being of our democracy that they overcome it. A two-party democracy is only as strong as the opposition party, and if the opposition party simply can’t get elected, then the party in power starts performing worse and worse because it doesn’t feel the competition. It’s happened in other democracies, and I’m afraid of this happening in the U.S.

It’s also important that the military doesn’t become associated for too long with one political party. But for that to change, the Democrats must overcome their cultural problems. And generally speaking, that means changing their skewed ideas of what it means to be a Southerner or an evangelical in uniform.

TAE: Why do so many reporters, academics, and some everyday Americans think that people who go into the Army or Marines must be folks who didn’t have bright prospects in college or the civilian work force?

Kaplan: To be diplomatic, I think it’s class prejudice and snobbery. Because most of the people I meet in the lower ranks aren’t poor or from the ghetto—they’re the solid working class, which does still exist. They’re from non-trendy places in between the two coasts, or from working-class urban neighborhoods.

Look, for example, at one of the Special Forces teams I was with in Algeria. The executive officer, a graduate of The Citadel, was from a farming family in Indiana. The master sergeant was from a farming family in New Hampshire. The warrant officer grew up in an Italian section of Queens, New York. That’s America. Whites in the barracks get very insulted if you confuse them with so-called white trash, and African Americans in the barracks get tremendously insulted if you confuse them with people in the inner city. With both groups, some of them may have come from the underclass, but they’ve long since separated themselves from it. They have no class envy.

TAE: Most European democracies have completely lost their fighting spirit, and are thus left with unimpressive military forces. Why is the U.S. a comparative exception today among modern Western nations in the survival of a righteous martial spirit among its population?

Kaplan: I think Australia still has it, and Japan is regaining it. People are a little uncomfortable with that, given Japan’s military history, but their reconstituted spirit is understandable given their terrific fear of a reunited greater Korea. And even Singapore has a very feisty, strong military. So we’re not the only ones.

But in all these cases, I think it’s because there is a sense of specific nationhood, anchored to a specific geography, which gives it a moral accountability. Once you’re de-linked from geography and you only think in terms of universal values, you’re no longer motivated. That’s why Europe has a specific problem. The old nation exists less and less in Europe.

TAE: Much of the American elite has also lost its “martial spirit.” How has the American elite changed over the years, and why do you think they have?

Kaplan: In the early 1960s, I remember hearing my truck-driving father talk about the “Establishment”—people like Averil Harriman, John McCloy, Charles Bolin, George Tannin. Even though these people were very liberal, they saw themselves as Americans. Today’s similar figures wouldn’t see themselves in the same light, because they so often socialize and cross paths with people from other countries.

So the American elite exists less and less as an institution, while the global elite exists more and more. Today’s media elites, for example, care more about the thoughts and writings of their “esteemed” colleagues in Britain or France than their counterparts at the Chicago Tribune or the Omaha World Herald. That was not the case when I was growing up.

TAE: Do you think part of the problem that elites have with George Bush is the fact that he comes across as so American?

Kaplan: Definitely. The reality is that President Bush comes across as a kind of throwback, an archetypal figure from an earlier America. So no matter what he says, post-national elites in Washington and New York are going to feel culturally alienated by him. That’s something he just has to deal with.

TAE: Give us your overall view of journalists today.

Kaplan: We live in an increasingly large and complex society, and it’s becoming separated out into fragments. And each group—journalists, lawyers, soldiers—tend to socialize with each other, to date each other, to marry each other.

But journalists have a problem that other professional groups don’t have, because their job requires objectivity. As they become one social caste whose elite members tend to live in certain places, with similar zip codes, in similar high-income environments, that becomes very hard to get around.

Moreover, newspapers like the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Baltimore Sun used to be almost as significant as the New York Times. Those days are over. So the elite newspapers—which are only on the coasts, not in the heartland—now drive the debate. The result is that journalistic objectivity has become very problematic.

TAE: Give us some guesses as to what the world’s flashpoints and hotspots will be ten years from now, in 2016.

Kaplan: I think the focus of our military and security concerns is going to move to Asia, because the strength of the Chinese economy will have military consequences. They’re going to spend a lot of money on submarines—both diesel and nuclear—and develop an imperial navy. Over the next 50 years, the Pacific Ocean will no longer be the American lake that it’s been for the past 50. Unless we begin military cooperation with Indonesia, for instance, at some point the Indonesian military will be captured by the Chinese in some form.

We have to figure out how to manage the re-emergence of China as a military power. I also think that the Indonesian, Malaysian, and southern Philippine archipelago will grow in importance as possible venues for world terroris
m. And I think that President Chavez of Venezuela is a potential Castro. Because he’s got a continental nation rather than an island, he could be more dangerous than Castro ever was. I think we need to develop a more realistic outlook on India. The future of the Middle East will be determined by Iran, and any major shift there will have consequences across the region. Even a subtle pivot by Iran toward greater cooperation with America would deal a serious blow to radicals through the region.

Published in Whatever Happened to Small Government? January/February 2006