Robert Kaplan promotes war and the alleged virtues of imperialism

Leading neoconservative Robert Kaplan has come up with a new rhetorical twist to justify the constant theme of neocon foreign policy: war, war and more war.

He gives one high-profile version of it in The Ruins of Empire in the Middle East Foreign Policy 05/25/2015. The original title Foreign Policy put on the article was, "It's Time to Bring Imperialism Back to the Middle East." In an addendum to the piece, Kaplan claims the earlier title "misrepresented what I wrote."

But Kaplan is pitching the same kind of frank imperialism that was so popular among neocons leading up to the Iraq War, 2003 edition: "The challenge now [in the Middle East] is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone."

Ari Heistein discusses Kaplan's analysis in Kaplan’s Fantasies of Empire and the Myth of the Arab Strongman Informed Comment 05/30/2015. He points to problems in Kaplan's mini-sketch of history. Like this from Kaplan:

And it is not just imperial forces that have declined and left chaos in their wake. The fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and the reduction of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria to that of an embattled statelet has ended the era of post-colonial strongmen, whose rule was organically connected to the legacy of imperialism. After all, those dictators ruled according to the borders erected by the Europeans. And because those imperial borders did not often configure with ethnic or sectarian ones, those dictatorial regimes required secular identities in order to span communal divides. All this has been brutally swept away.

Hestein replies:

While one of Kaplan’s key arguments was that “Totalitarianism was the only answer to the end of Western imperialism” in reality totalitarianism was the answer to imperialism. When looking at Egypt, a country ruled by Arab strongmen for nearly six decades and one of the most influential powers in the Arab Middle East, Kaplan’s claim immediately collapses. The Free Officers deposed King Farouk in 1952, which signaled the end of Egypt’s thirty year parliamentary era and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. A short time after taking office, Nasser destroyed much of Egypt’s civil society and consolidated power through political violence and repression — he was the quintessential Arab strongman. Egypt’s history seems to corroborate Kaplan’s claim with only one problem: the British had up to 80,000 troops in Egypt until 1956.

I recently wrote about Kaplan's latest warmongering themes in Neocon bigwig Robert Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos 01/13/2015,

See also my post of nearly eight years ago on Kaplan's war fantasies, Over the cliff with the neocons one more time? 09/03/2007.

Kaplan has been providing more of the same in places like this article in The Atlantic, In Defense of Empire April 2014 issue.

Neocons differed even in the 1990s and 2000s over their ideological cover. Some preferred the rhetoric of democratic imperialism while others talked more in the terms of allegedly benign order on which Kaplan relies here. Digby Parton writes in Restoring the awe Hullabaloo 06/02/82015:

[Zach Beauchamp] goes on to say that Bush administration believed after 9/11 that the middle east needed to be remade in order to stop jihadism and Iraq was the most logical place to start. But that's not the way it was. The policymakers in the Bush administration had been lobbying to go into Iraq long before there was any fear of jihadism. In fact, they barely acknowledged jihadism existed. Now it's true that they wanted to remake the middle east but it was for a host of reasons that had to do with maintaining American hegemony, oil, Israel etc. Jihadism wasn't even on their radar, hence the August 6th [2001] memorandum ["Bin Laden determined to strike in US"] to which Bush replied, "ok you've covered your ass..."

Beauchamp quotes a number of Bush officials from their various books and interviews saying they were motivated by 9/11. But if it was, it was only because it gave them the excuse to do what they had wanted to do for a decade [in particular, invading Iraq]. ...

Bush's freedom agenda held no answers to these problems because it wasn't a real agenda. It was a PR campaign designed to make Americans feel good about themselves for invading a country that hadn't attacked us. And, to be fair, there were neoconservatives who actually wanted to believe this drivel about the "birthing of democracy." I'm fairly sure that Bush was one of them. (I used to always refer to them as "starry-eyed neocons.") But you can bet Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't believe a bit of it --- they were part of a hardocre [sic], imperial clacque that went all the way back to the 70s. To the extent they signed on to the "lighter side" of neoconservatism it was purely for propaganda purposes. Their motives were about showcasing American power, period.

It's dreary having to talk about this again. But the results in Iraq are what they are. Many people predicted it would come to something like this and maybe it was inevitable at some point. But regardless of their "true motivations" Bush' neoconservative cronies had been pushing for this thing since the first gulf war and knew they'd never have a better opportunity.

9/11 was a gift not a motive.

Neocon bigwig Robert Kagan Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos

Robert Kaplan, one of the leading neocons has a new think piece out, America Is Fated to Lead The National Interest 12/22/2014 (Jan-Feb 2015 issue).

Two points are especially worth notice.

One is that Kaplan justifies the neocons' much-desired and very disastrous war in Iraq with the argument that, hey, so we left chaos behind, so what? It's the fault of fate, or God, or something.

The second is a related rhetorical move, to declare it realism to not worry to too much about the fact that wars one advocates turns out to be disasters. In other words, it's perfectly fine to go on advocating war and killing without regard to the high possibility of bad outcomes.

This following paragraph sounds almost regretful. But it follows one that blames the whole mess on inadequate administration of the occupation by the Cheney-Bush Administration. Conservatism - including neoconservatism - can never fail, it can only be failed, as Digby likes to say.

I supported the Iraq War. I mention this whenever publicly discussing the issue. I was not in favor of exporting democracy. Anyone who knows my work knows that I have seen the benefits of enlightened dictatorship in many instances, and still do. But Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a dictatorship: it constituted a suffocating totalitarianism somewhere south of Stalin and north of the Assads in Syria. I knew it intimately from several reporting trips to Iraq in the 1980s, and thus I was a journalist who had gotten too close to his story. In short, I became committed. Yet, no matter how Iraq turns out in the future, even if there is a sharp improvement and the Islamic State is defeated, the price America paid there will still have been far too steep. The war as it turned out—not how it might have turned out according to some counterfactual — was a disaster.

Fate comes in here:

... there may never have been even the possibility of a soft landing for the Baathist regimes in the Levant [Iraq and Syria], given how much these regimes pulverized society, eviscerating all forms of intermediary social organizations except for the state at the top and the tribe and extended family at the bottom. Whether we acted militarily or not, in Iraq or in Syria, the result in any event was going to be anarchy. This is fatalism, I know. It denies human agency — and, therefore, moral responsibility on our part. But while that might be reprehensible, it does not necessarily make my assertion false. [my emphasis]

Do I need to say that anyone with a reasonably decent conscience would think that if the result was going to be the same either way that it was horribly immoral to initiate a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and turned millions into refugees?

So, Kaplan in this essay expresses his admiration for "the benefits of enlightened dictatorship" and his contempt for the idea of promoting democracy with the wars he advocates. And says that this mysterious Fate of which he speaks exempts him and other war advocates from "moral responsibility on our part."

His manipulation of the concept of foreign policy realism involves a peculiar reading of the Nixon Administration's decision to establish a new relationship with China as part of a way to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. This was an important moment in US foreign policy, not least because the dogmatic policy that the US had pursued since the victory of the Chinese Communists and establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 had been particularly brainless, driven by ideology, ignorance and fringy rightwing politics.

Kagan's conclusion: "Thus does an amoral strategy, in the service of a naked national interest, have a moral result."

I read this odd string of arguments as a pitch for the idea that it doesn't matter that we pursue an immoral and/or illegal policy, it's okay because it make work out for the best. And if it doesn't, it's because of Fate, and the bad result would have happened anyway.

It's also notable that Kaplan fills his essay with seemingly scholarly references, that don't really amount to much more than name-dropping in the middle of his sloganeering: Dean Acheson, conservative Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, conservative French philosopher Raymond Aron, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Bernard DeVoto, Patrick Leigh Fermor, historian Orlando Figes, Herodotus, Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntington, famous foreign policy Realist George Kennan, neocon heavyweight Jeane Kirkpatrick, unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger, and William Shakespeare.

He adds in various historical references and some geographical blather about America's "navigable inland waterways" and such to promote his ideas about Fate.

Kaplan's praise of historian and literary critic Bernard DeVoto strike me as odd. Kaplan describes him as "my personal hero, a once-celebrated literary figure now forgotten." I haven't forgotten him. I still periodically consult one of his three books on my bookshelf for this or that about the history of the American West.

Based on those books, and on DeVoto's liberal interventionist inclinations prior to Pearl Harbor - inclinations widely shared by Democrats at the time - Kaplan writes, "he saw the good in Manifest Destiny before generations of academics would see nothing but evil in it. Yet he also understood — perhaps at a more profound level than anyone else, before or since — that the blessings of geographical fate had freighted America with global responsibilities." And he draws the conclusion, that I doubt DeVoto himself ever would have stated this way, "If you haven’t internalized moments like the California gold rush and westward expansion, you can’t fully grasp why America deserves to lead." (emphasis in original)

DeVoto's patriotism and admiration of the historical accomplishments in American history certainly didn't prevent him from describing the antiwar attitude of Emerson and Thoreau toward the Mexican War and that complexity of that conflict, a major chapter in the story of US westward expansion. His jaundiced description of the President James Polk's leadership in that war is particularly memorable. (See DeVoto's The Year of Decision, 1846; published 1943).

Over the cliff with the neocons one more time?

If Dick Cheney gets his way and starts a war with Iran, that would be the case.

The September Atlantic has gotten a lot of attention because of Joshua Green's article on Karl Rove and some for Matthew Scully's piece about speechwriting for the Bush White House. But it also contains an article by neocon war cheerleader Robert Kaplan, "The Plane That Would Bomb Iran", an excerpt from his book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (2007).

The plane to which he refers is the B-2 Spirit, which he gushes over like a child admiring a plastic model:

I understood Bo's poignant, if over-the-top, infatuation with the plane. Indeed, a B-2 is endlessly fascinating merely to look at. The official Air Force description has it right: The B-2 is not so much a plane as a "flying wing," a jagged gray-black wedge with a small bubble rising out of its center, which is where the pilot and mission commander sit. Seen head-on, the bubble, with its dark windshield, looks like nothing so much as Darth Vader's mask. The ever-so-slightly-turned-down-beak design of the plane's front tip heightens the sinister effect. As you walk around the nose, the swept-back angle of the wings makes them disappear, and the plane seems to shrink in size, bringing to mind a small bat. But once you reach the back of the plane, the size of the wings becomes apparent, and you realize just how big the plane is. Its wingspan is 172 feet - greater than the distance covered by Orville Wright during his first flight at Kitty Hawk.

"Look, Mommy, look! The plane looks like Darth Vader!"

Can't these guys like Robert Kaplan find some other way to work out their arrested-development issues other than becoming war publicists who promote actual wars in which real human beings kill and die? Can't they just find a good, violent video game and entertain themselves instead?

But being a neocon also apparently means never having to learn anything from failures and disasters, either. Kaplan still is a true believer in the magic power of air war. Kaplan gushes about the high-tech fantasy that Rummy also devoutly believed in of doing war from the air without Americans having to get hurt, while the folks back home can watch the fun on FOX News and only a bunch of brown people will get killed.

Robert Kaplan's poster girl

He gives the fantasy in the form of quotes from an Air Force colonel reciting the air-power true believer line:

Colonel Wheeler made the point that in future conflicts conventional assets like the B-2 and fast-attack submarines would be used in tandem with Predator drones, Special Forces A-teams, and Marine Corps platoons. Forget the debate about having needed more troops in Iraq after the initial invasion. As true as that might be, our military's primary focus in the next few decades will not be on massive troop levels; it will be on hitting specific targets with commando-style ground units that could call in air and sea strikes from platforms that are either untouchable or unseen. For example, during a war with a regional power like Iran, down-and-dirty planes like the A-10 and the AC-130, which typically provide close air support, would be less likely to be used than a high-altitude heavy like the B-2, after Special Operations teams have gone in on the ground for limited periods to identify targets for the planes' bunker-buster and other high-impact bombs.

Such operations would require an exponential increase in complexity - a greater variety of assets used in quick, symphonic offensives. "We may not be able to mass troops like we used to," Wheeler observed. "It's not just a matter of negative publicity from a global media, but of a profusion of competitors that will increasingly have the ability to hit such large formations with weapons of mass destruction. And that will be a chance we won't want to take. (my emphasis)

No more RPGs or IEDs to worry about. No house-to-house searches or car bombs. Just high-tech whiz-bang gadgets fighting our wars for us.

But this isn't just dreaming up science-fiction stories. The Air Power Gospel teaches that everything that rally matters in war can be done by planes and drones and bombs and various accessories. The only thing that stops the US military from being invincible in every situation is that The Media report on all this depressing news about dead babies and stuff (collateral damage, you know, it happens in all wars and besides this happens less in this war than the last one and half of it is enemy propaganda anyway). And that makes the wimpy civilians and gutless politicians back home start wanting to put limits and require exit plans and things like that. But when American soldiers don't get killed, there's no problem. So we can have wars any time we want for any purpose and we'll always win.

That, by the way, was a large part of the theory that Rummy was implementing in the Iraq War. Shock and awe, and all that.

The fact that the results are different that the magic model of painless warfare (for Americans) didn't work out in Iraq any more than it ever has anywhere doesn't deter the devout for continuing to believe it. And going to war based on faith in it. (The Kosovo War of 1999 may look like an exception, but that's a whole other story.)

If the B-2 is necessary, for both our force structure and our negotiating credibility, as Colonel Wheeler believes it is, then its cost of more than $1 billion per plane is a truly depressing indicator of the price of empire. "Look at the rate of return al-Qaeda got on 9/11," one former civilian defense official told me. "For an investment of just a few hundred thousand dollars, they forced us to spend billions." In other words, as necessary as the B-2 might be, what's its rate of return - 20 percent, perhaps? "I'm not saying that we require a rate of return like al-Qaeda gets," this former official went on, "but we'll need to narrow the difference if we're going to remain a great power."

Um, that's close to a real-world thought. We're spending bejillions justified by the Great Global War on Terror (GWOT) to counter terrorists who hide out in caves and mountain villages and bring of low-tech terrorist attacks at a fraction of the cost of even one of these magic B-2 Spirits?

The Atlantic article doesn't continue with Kaplan's thoughts on how to improve the ROI on his sleek, adorable planes. If you measure the return by, say, number of bombs dropped in hostilities, then more bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanding the war to Iran and Somalia or wherever would be a way to do that.

If people just stop responding to the alleged apocalyptic, existential threat from The Terrorists, we can always switch to another enemy: China, India, Russia, maybe El Salvador or Grenada again. There are plenty of possibilities.

I know this post is written in a sarcastic and disgusted tone. But the real point here, and the reason Kaplan's article disgusted me as it did, is to see his blind faith in the high-tech mirage that always keeps receding over the horizon, but that its advocates are sure we've really attained now and it will really work this time honest-to-Pete in the next war.

And I thought of this Kaplan piece when I saw the paper by Dan Plesch (Director of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies’ Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy) and Martin Butcher, Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East 08/28/07, that I referenced in an earlier post.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. (emphasis in original)

Though some ground forces would be used in this scenario, it would be done while "avoiding a ground invasion". The magic of air power will do it all, from destroying Iran's military capability to setting up regime change. All quick and easy.

As Gene Lyons wrote a couple of weeks ago:

With the U. S. in danger of losing both wars simultaneously, Cheney is pressing for a third war against an opponent larger than the other two combined. This isn’t conservatism, neo- or otherwise. It’s madness.

Tags: iran war, robert kaplan