The Anti-Kaplan, Fisked

Thanks again to Carpetblogger for the heads up to this anti-Kaplan rant. Younghusband titled the original post on the piece “The Anti-Kaplan,” so I’ll preserve the title, although that really elevates Bissell to far more importance than he deserves—would one call a bitchy left-wing blog “the Anti-Bush”? I don’t think so.

Warning: this is long.

During his often brave and occasionally astounding career of peregrination, Kaplan has earned an influential readership. Not many authors can expect blurbs from senators, former Department of Defense secretaries, the Director of Central Intelligence, or Tom Brokaw, but Kaplan can. Despite (or perhaps because of) Kaplan’s polarizing worldview, he has been embraced by the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

True. The man is just that good.

Of late, however, there have been alarming indications that Kaplan has undergone some sort of imploded political transformation.

This is a not uncommon critique of Kaplan’s current work. You can look at Kaplan’s writing in three phases: the first was the travel writing of an insightful journalist (Surrender or Starve through Eastward to Tartary) that won him his stripes; the second phase was big picture knowledge on how to look at the world (Coming Anarchy, Warrior Politics, Supremacy by Stealth), and the third and current phase is today’s American military; Kaplan has frequently stated that Imperial Grunts is the first in a series of books on the American military on the ground. His current work has been subject to much criticism of romanticism and machoism. When properly articulated (which is unfortunately rare), I understand and sympathize with these criticisms. I admit that I preferred “Classic Kaplan,”Â? when he was an undiscovered garage rock band that the mainstream was too cool to enjoy, reporting on undiscovered corners of the globe ignored by the mainstream press and American policymakers.

But criticizing Kaplan “of late,” as if to indicate a criticism of Imperial Grunts was his target, was a straw man distraction. Bissell proceeds to bash everything Kaplan’s ever done. Watch out—the man is armed with a thesaurus.

His books have grown more vague but also more strident; angrier, but also more complacent. He has, in short, begun to write like a man who knows his audience, with a correspondingly fatal confidence that his words will be contemplated in high governmental and military aeries indeed.

That’s borderline plagiarism (from the Salon.com review of Coming Anarchy in 2001):

In reading Kaplan’s later books, I was struck with just how much his writing has changed, and how conscious he seems to have become of the effect his words could have on policy. Gone is some of the lyricism, some of the sheer joy in adventure. Newly present is an invisible audience of army officers, intelligence analysts and Foreign Affairs subscribers.

Back to Bissell:

In 2000, the historian Robert Kagan noted Kaplan’s “cheap pessimism,”Â? his indifference “as to whether societies are governed democratically or tyrannically,”Â? and his “weak”Â? grip on history”¦ In 1993, the Balkans expert Noel Malcolm gutted Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts for its many errors of fact and judgment; Kaplan’s hapless response earned this rejoinder from Malcolm: “The basic problem, I think, is that Mr. Kaplan cannot read.”Â?

It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to try and undermine ideas/theories/individuals with which a critic disagrees by resorting to insults. Kaplan’s writing, being so fundamentally controversial (democracy isn’t necessarily good; America is an Empire and that’s a good thing; colonialism had great benefits) is a frequent target of such tactics.

Kaplan’s real and growingly evident problem is not his Parkinson’s grip on history, or that he is a bonehead or a warmonger, but rather that he is an incompetent thinker and a miserable writer.

:ahem: See previous comment.

Bissell then proceeds to bash Kaplan’s section on Uzbekistan in Ends of the Earth. Two trusted authorities I trust on this topic are split. I am unqualified to comment. Moving onwards:

How to deal with this fractious world is Kaplan’s great question. Some years ago, he has written, after a conference where “intellectuals held forth about the moral responsibility of the United States in the Balkans,”Â? he took a cab back to the airport and was asked by the cabbie, “If there’s no oil there, what’s in it for us?”Â? This was, Kaplan says, “a question none of the intellectuals had answered.”Â? And shame on them, because “thousands of words and a shelf of books in recent years about our moral interest in the region do not add up to one sentence of national interest. . . . It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.”Â? Kaplan once believed that something called “amoral self-interest”Â? should be the defining aspect of American foreign policy. His hope for the Clinton administration was that it could “condense”Â? a justification for Balkan intervention “into folksy shorthand,”Â? because “speaking and writing for an elite audience is not enough.”Â? Robert D. Kaplan, meet George W. Bush. The writer who could once argue that “the world is too vast and its problems too complicated for it to be stabilized by American authority,”Â? has found his leader in a man who in the 2000 presidential debates proclaimed that the job of the military was “to fight and win war,”Â? not toil as “nation builders.”Â? Kaplan is said to have briefed President Bush in 2001, and today finds these protean gentlemen in a surlier and far more interventionist mood.

Although I can’t speak for Kaplan, the above paragraph is an accurate description of what I believe. National interest is required to motivate the general public to sacrifice; humanitarian intervention is an important factor and we should always talk about morality, but must always come second to national self-interest (“Speak Victorian, Think Pagan”); Bush’s foreign policy may be inconsistent, but it’s generally on the right track. Having now properly described this viewpoint, and since Bissell does not agree with it, I would now expect him to articulate what is wrong with this rationale. If only.

[Bush and Kaplan] have fused an apparent personal fondness for strutting machismo with a fetishized idea of simplicity’s value. Both have willed into unsteady reality extremely forced senses of personal identification with the common American, whose drooling need for that which is clear and cut trumps all other moral and political considerations. Bush has gone from an isolationist to an interventionist minus the crucial intermediary stage wherein he actually became interested in other places.

“Fetishized”! “Machismo”! Are you feeling naughty yet? One wonders if Bissell knows how to write a rebuttal without resorting to insults. (Unfortunately, this style is what passes for a ‘critique’ in Bissell’s city of residence.)

Kaplan has traveled from the belief that America should only “insert troops where overwhelming moral considerations crosshatch with strategic ones”Â? to arguing that “September 11 had given the U.S. military the justification to go out scouting for trouble, and at the same time to do some good,”Â? seemingly without understanding that he has even changed. Doubtless both men would sit any skeptic down and soberly explain that September 11 changed everything. What September 11 changed, however, was not the world itself but their understanding of America’s role in the world.

Kaplan’s belief that we should “insert troops where overwhelming moral considerations crosshatch with strategic ones”Â? remains unchanged, no matter what statements you may misquote to try and say otherwise.

Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the extension of politics by other means.

Cliché alert.

Bush and Kaplan, on the other hand, appear to advocate war as cultural politics by other means.

Told you so.

This has resulted in a collision of second-rate minds with third-rate policies.

Yet more insults without substantiation, using rhetorical gimmicks to try and make up for a lack of real arguments.

Because of his “forgettable”Â? résumé and education at a “non-prestigious college,”Â? Kaplan believes, he was unable to find work. So he went traveling. A graceful man might recount his early, humbling attempts to become a writer with, well, grace. Kaplan, however, has hewn from this block of youthfully ordinary frustration a chip he has spot-welded to his shoulder: “Like so many other free-lance journalists I would meet over the years, I was never to enjoy the social and professional status””?or the generous travel budgets””?of foreign correspondents for major media organizations.”Â? Never? This man has written for the Atlantic Monthly for twenty years.

Kaplan is exactly right when he notes that established institutions such as the mainstream media regularly overlook great talent because of a lack of Ivy League pedigree. Kaplan’s success in influencing major policy decisionmakers in all levels of government despite this makes me like him even more. (And assuming Bissell is not being willfully ignorant, there is a major gulf between the mainstream media of big newspapers and cable television shows and the The Atlantic Monthly.)

In all of his books, but especially in Mediterranean Winter, Kaplan is incapable of making a point about the past without pointing a finger at the present. To wit: “Carthage’s defeat in the First Punic War””?like Germany’s in World War I””?led to anarchy at home.”Â? But how is the 2,200-year-old First Punic War at all otherwise comparable to Weimar Germany?

Not incapable… but you are right in that Kaplan frequently makes analogies between modern history and the ancient world to emphasize his oft-stated belief that human nature has not changed, and the ancient world shares much in common with the present.

[Regarding Kaplan’s first book, Surrender or Starve]: For once this monopolist of doom was looking around him rather than only forward and back.

For once? This suggests once again that Bissell doesn’t understand his subject. First, SOS is, along with Balkan Ghosts, Kaplan’s darkest book. But going beyond that, Kaplan frequently states that he is an optimist in his hopes, but he examines the world through tragic realism. By thinking pessimistically, you avoid the perils inherent in blissful, idealist thinking. Welcome to Realism 101.

Soldiers of God, his next book, concerns Kaplan’s travels with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. He admits in the foreword to the paperback version that he “was caught up in the struggle to liberate Afghanistan, and my lack of objectivity shows; nor was I fair to some people, or as critical of others, as I should have been.”Â? Actually, Kaplan is fairer and more objective in this book than anywhere else. Nonetheless, he still defends his “brutal, tragic”Â? position that US policy in Afghanistan was morally appropriate: “The United States, in the 1980s, was doing what great powers have done throughout history. . . . A state that neglects the projection of power has little chance of spreading its values.”Â? But surely foresight is called for while the great power in question is spreading its values. American “policy”Â? in Afghanistan consisted mainly of throwing guns and money at whichever nationalist, religious psychopath, or “commander”Â? Pakistan’s secret service put forth as a slayer of Communist infidels. To be sure, the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan was well deserved and did help hasten the collapse of the Soviet regime, but many CIA agents on the ground and even many Afghans warned the State Department that it was financing its own assassins. As is now abundantly clear, the United States’ Afghanistan policy did not spread its values but undermine them.

Kaplan in 2002: “I did not write that I would have a cosmic plan… Brilliant plans are commonplace: Engineering even a moderately successful foreign policy through a vast bureaucracy is harder.” Or to paraphrase a more recent statement by Kaplan, don’t think that a foreign policy that succeeds only 70% of the time [and thus fails 30% of the time] is a failure. A 70% success rate is awesome. There are too many variables. Even if a plan is great, it must be effectively achieved by layer upon layer of foreign policy bureacracy, which will require every level of State, Defense, the CIA, and more to work with each other. Yes, the US ultimately sowed the seeds of the Taliban in ending Soviet rule of Afghanistan. Yes, some people on the ground believed this would hurt us in the long run. Yes, officials in Washington ignored them, at their peril. And your point is? Welcome to the real world. Your 20/20 hindsight from the comfort of New York City does not impress me.

One can tell the charge has stung him. “Neither Martians nor President Clinton killed Bosnian Muslims,”Â? Kaplan writes. “Other Bosnians did.”Â? This is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out. What is less reasonable is his belief that Bosnians killed Bosnian Muslims because they had been programmed to do so by history and ethnicity.

Kaplan never once said they were “programmed,” nor that it was inevitable. In Balkan Ghosts, Kaplan writes an engrossing account of how while much of Europe couldn’t remember history before the Nazis or Communists, Croats and Serbs were talking of exacting revenge about minor events from centuries past that would have left even the most intelligent , history-savvy Washington policy wonk of the early 1990s scratch her head. Encouraged by the new freedom of a quasi-democracy, compounded by a league of influential and vengeful clerics, disaster was looming on the horizon.

In Kaplan’s telling, Balkan mass-murder was inevitable and unsurprising, given the region’s history. One wonders why, then, those who were slaughtered didn’t see it coming and get out. “Nevertheless,”Â? Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts’s new foreword, “nothing I write should be taken as a justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn.”Â? Here is a writer reassuring us that he does not think genocide is justifiable, and that he condemns it. Any book written in a way to require such a statement is on thin moral ice.

That’s and incoherent and lame argument that is wrong—but it’s where I’ll end because it’s so typical. Something about Kaplan’s writing is repugnant, outrageous, shocking or otherwise unacceptable to the point where the critic dismisses it with a shrug and tries to sell his review to the reader as is. Bissell does make the occasional point, and I’ve responded to some above. But it’s drowned out by the ad hominen arguments, and I can’t be bothered to sift through the second half of the article looking for a theme. Dismissing someone with a few curt words is one thing, and we all do it. But when you spew out 8,000+ words, I’d hope for something a little more substantive that a colossal bitch-fest.

Kaplan’s critics come by the truckload, and perhaps I should have listened to my learned colleague’s advice. But Carpetblogger baited us with “you can’t let this go unanswered.” Now that I’ve got that off my chest, normally blogging to commence.