[Peace-discuss] Robert Kaplan

[David Green]

An excerpt from an article by John MacArthur on the
commondreams.org website, regarding the frightening
Robert Kaplan's recent manifesto in The Atlantic. The
British failure referred to is that of Iraq after
World War 1. The Lawrence is of course T.E. Lawrence,
Lawrence of Arabia:

Already we are deluged with fatuous intellectual
support for the notion that the United States can
succeed where the British failed -- the purest example
being Robert Kaplan's article in the current Atlantic
Monthly, which lists "ten rules for managing the
world." Like so many American journalists in the early
days of "counter-insurgency" in Vietnam, Kaplan is
enamored of our Lawrences: the Special Forces,
sporting green berets. If only, pines the smitten
Kaplan, these polymath professional soldiers could be
unleashed by "timid politicians" to "nurture" the
forces for liberal democracy in the Third World (just
as we nurtured the South Vietnamese army). 

Kaplan's phrase "Be light and lethal" was essentially
the watchword of the Vietnam fantasists in the CIA and
the military. 

There is too much narcissistic nonsense in Kaplan's
essay for it to be quickly summarized, but two
approving quotations explain most of his thesis. One,
from an unnamed Green Beret: "I wish people in
Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their
systems." The other, from a retired Army major about
the benefits of a dual personality: "A Special Forces
guy has to be a lethal killer one moment and a
humanitarian the next" -- like John Wayne in The Green
Berets, or Lawrence of Arabia, the sometime sadist,
sometime masochist. 

"Unfortunately," writes Kaplan, "for the United States
the mission is not always everything. . . . [I]t is
often hamstrung by diplomacy and domestic public
opinion." What a shame. Perhaps we might want to try a
little counter-insurgency here at home. 



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