Kaplan reviewed in the NY Times

From yesterday in the New York Times Book Review, a beautiful review of Kaplan’s career and a brutal review of Imperial Grunts. The link is here for registered users, an abridged excerpt follows.

‘Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground,’ by Robert D. Kaplan
November 27, 2005
Review by DAVID LIPSKY

Robert D. Kaplan is a proud realist, but his career has had the long odds and dream rewards of a Rocky picture. In his mid-20’s, he took off for Europe with $1,000, no job and no return ticket. He meant to report on foreign lands. Two books followed – and, he said later, “sank without a trace.” So he wrote a third. Fourteen publishers said no. When “Balkan Ghosts” – a tour of the region’s scarred history – finally appeared in 1993, armies of the ethnically pure were on the march in Bosnia. Kaplan had his first taste of the best-seller list; then things got interesting. Bill Clinton was on the fence about sending American forces into the area; “Balkan Ghosts” – it was later reported – nudged the president toward “no.” Robert Kaplan was leaving traces.

In February 1994, his essay “The Coming Anarchy” was on the cover of The Atlantic Monthly. It depicted our uncongenial future. Clinton praised it (“stunning”), and Vice President Gore spearheaded a task force on “countries at risk.” Kaplan seemed touched by what Saul Bellow called “the magics”; he had perfect trouble-spot pitch. He was a voice to be heeded, and he ascended to a dream zone of influence, lecturing at the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thomas L. Friedman named him as one of the post-cold-war world’s most widely read thinkers. In 2001, he was invited to brief President Bush.

Kaplan had joined the multiple-hat-wearers, “in my case, that of a travel writer and a foreign affairs analyst.” In “Balkan Ghosts,” he’d greeted the Berlin Wall’s collapse with a glum, midproject stuckness. “I was definitely not where The Story was. It struck me just how far away from The Story, in both time and space, the Balkans were.” By the time of “The Coming Anarchy,” he understood part of his audience would be wearing Pentagon access badges; the scene got a rewrite. When the wall fell, he “happened to be in Kosovo. . . . The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin.”

His travel books took restless, ambitious titles: “The Ends of the Earth,” “Eastward to Tartary.” His compass led him to the world’s broken places: the Middle East, Pakistan, the satellite states the Soviets had vacated like subtenants junking an apartment. He hunted for civic diseases that might one day infect America, and these works stake out a new genre – the anti-travel book. They make you want to cancel airline reservations and change the locks.

Travel fed the policy books, bulking out the tenets of Kaplanism: The world is a threat. Anarchy is waiting at the arrivals gate; tribal and cultural grudges crowd the borders. The present is the past traveling under a pseudonym. Humanitarian idealists always muff it; realists count on power politics, cooperative dictators and imperialism. Years before the invasion of Iraq would make his words prescient, Kaplan urged a clenched foreign policy: “We will initiate hostilities . . . whenever it is absolutely necessary and we see a clear advantage in doing so, and we will justify it morally after the fact.” He added, “Nor is that cynical.”

Now, with “Imperial Grunts,” Kaplan moves out with rucksack and notepad to chart a world he anticipated. “By the turn of the 21st century,” he writes, “the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth.” His interest isn’t combat. He’s after “imperial maintenance on the ground,” a prose snapshot of soldiers in “the barracks and outposts of the American Empire.” The trip takes him to seaside Yemen, nomad Mongolia, tropical and paranoid Colombia, Africa and the Philippines, moonscape Afghanistan and cafe-and-minaret Iraq.

And the book goes to pieces immediately. The first problem is headgear. Kaplan’s got both his hats on at the same time, and the travel writer (who likes flavors and vistas) keeps barging in. “Who here was Al Qaeda? I asked myself, licking my fingers after devouring a greasy chicken in a sidewalk restaurant filled with armed youngsters.” The next one is my favorite: “We were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared.” And it’s a shame such well-traveled eyes are welded between numb ears: Details are “grisly,” murders are “gruesome”; you hear “faint” echoes but “shrill” cries; “chiseled” bodies cross “manicured” landscapes; troops become “hardened,” resemblances grow “uncanny.” Kaplan is trying for fine writing – literary special effects – but he doesn’t resist the old grooves, and if a writer can’t avoid stock expression, it suggests imprisonment at the conceptional level. Kaplan keeps getting into scrapes at the keyboard. “I wanted a visual sense of the socioeconomic stew in which Al Qaeda flourished.” You smile in admiration, as at something rare, like a triple play; it’s a double mixed metaphor…

Like many writers and houseguests, Kaplan needs an argument to get his best juices flowing. But here he’s on a trip to utopia, and what emerges are surprising opinions. He meets a Filipino and observes: “His smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism.” He chastises the “elite” for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war “every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.” The longtime Kaplan reader pulls out the older books. Vietnam is the war he’s described as a “mire,” a “mistake” and “a disaster.”

This is a strange passage for three reasons: first, Kaplan lived abroad – in Israel, Greece and Portugal – for 15 years; second, his wife, a Canadian [CURZON: sorry, she’s Greek], presumably at one time held a foreign passport; finally, he served in the Israeli Army – wore another nation’s colors, one of the most global steps a citizen can take.

Despite this, Kaplan, the realist, has elsewhere defined his realism as “an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths. . . . The realism exhibited here may appear radical.” In fact, it tends toward the cozily familiar: like evolutionary psychology, his findings don’t so much upset conventional wisdom as support it with a surprising pillar. Most situations, however novel, will submit to cold-war realpolitik and the “he’s-our-son-of-a-bitch” alliance…

In “Imperial Grunts,” Kaplan twice assures us, in identical language, that the soldiers he meets are “having the time of their lives.” (Later on, when one soldier in Iraq says he longs for action, another responds, “No thanks, I’ve had my fill of shooting civilians.” Kaplan lets the moment pass without comment.) Toward the book’s end, Kaplan reflects that not to have participated in some kind of war was to be “denied the American experience,” to be “not fully American.” He continues, “The war on terror was giving two generations of Americans vivid memories.” This might strike a reader as a somewhat more cosmopolitan notion than anything the elites could cook up at their “seminars and dinner parties.” War as self-enhancement, as an experience not-to-be-missed. “The American experience,” Kaplan writes, “was exotic, romantic, exciting, bloody and emotionally painful, sometimes all at once. It was a privilege, as well as great fun, to be with those who were still living it.”

It’s hard to say whether this is travel writing or analysis. But it’s clearly from a book by Robert Kaplan.