A Surprisingly Accurate Assessment

is made by Robert Kaplan in an interview with The American Enterprise Magazine Online. His take on our Military's morale, motivation, and strength of character is refreshing; so few in the media understand what it means to be 'Military'. Mr Kaplan gets his understanding honestly, by actually having spent years associated and imbedded with American Military personnel-- or so it would seem, for even the big names in nightly news don't get what Kaplan gets.

Here's a few choice comments...

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: 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: 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: 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: 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.