Ed,
when I read this piece earlier it struck me as you mention, that Kaplan was
writing about these events as if he had created them into being. He glorifies the soldier as the
epitome of the modern democratic ambassador, a highly trained, deadly working
representative of the superpower.
Hemingway had such an effect, did he
not, on a generation of men and women and
war?
Meanwhile,
more retired military fill former diplomat-only posts around the globe and
increasingly, multinational corporations with ties to the military industrial
technology complex.
Have
we undermined public education so much or lost all confidence in it that we
only trust the military to train our leaders?
KWC
-----Original
Message-----
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 7:08
AM
To: futurework
Subject: [Futurework] Ten simple
rules
The current issue of
Atlantic contains an article by Robert Kaplan entitled "Supremacy by Stealth".
I’ve read most of it, but it's the kind of article that I find difficult to
finish. It sets out ten rules that America, as the new Rome, should use to
govern the world and make it safe for freedom and democracy, American
style.
I first encountered Mr.
Kaplan a few years ago in an article entitled "The Coming Anarchy", also in
Atlantic. The message there, seeming entirely credible at the time, was that
the world was going to hell in a handbasket. The message in the current
article is anything but credible. It’s that, yes, the world could go to hell
in a handbasket, but it won’t because America is there to prevent it from
doing so. And it can even be fixed up if America but follows Mr. Kaplan’s ten
simple rules.
It must, for example,
produce more Joppolos, the central figure in John Hersey’s second world war
novel "A Bell for Adano". Apparently, Mr. Joppolo knew exactly how to win the
trust of the townspeople he had to deal with. As Iraq and Afghanistan have
demonstrated, it would be nice to have people like that, but they don’t come
around very often. And, by being "light and lethal", you can accomplish great
things, like helping the Bolivian government track down and kill Che Guevara
in 1967. (Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, but some of us still remember Che as the eternal
revolutionary and a force for liberating the oppressed. I for one do not see
tracking him down and killing him as a good thing. It's a bit like the Romans
bragging about tracking down and killing Christ!) Or, like the British,
and the Romans before them, by speaking Victorian and thinking pagan you can
try to persuade people of the wisdom of your ways, but, if you can’t
accomplish that, you do have other means.
What Mr. Kaplan suggests is
that American forces have already followed his ten simple rules, though
perhaps not consistently enough. He says they have done a very good job at
times, as when they trained Salvadorian counterinsurgency forces, but he
doesn’t then mention is that these forces became government death squads and
killing machines that brutalized the countryside and cost thousands of people
there lives.
The image that Mr. Kaplan
presents in his ten points is a clean, tidy and efficient one that, like B52
bombers, flies high above the messy, dirty world of his earlier article.
Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, it just doesn’t figure.
Ed Weick
