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Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond
 
 
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Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond (Paperback)

by Robert D. Kaplan (Author)
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It is the dawn of the 21st century, and the United States has appropriated the entire Earth. So journalist Robert Kaplan writes in his paean to the American fighting man and woman, Imperial Grunts. The U.S. has quietly--with little public debate--forged an empire that is "ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice," writes Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly magazine who has written 10 earlier books on foreign affairs and travel, including the acclaimed Balkan Ghosts. Imperial Grunts is Kaplan's account of his travels to the frontiers of the U.S. imperium. From the dustbowl of northern Yemen to the coca fields of Colombia and the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah, Kaplan takes readers to the war-torn edges of the U.S. empire and visits with front-line grunts who guard it and try to expand its reach.

"Welcome to Injun Country," is the catchphrase Kaplan hears from all the U.S. soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors we meet. In the view of American troops, they are taming an "unruly" frontier in the tradition of General George Custer. We all know what happened to Custer and, later, to the Native Americans whom the 7th Cavalry was sent out to pacify. But far from criticizing that mission or finding in the analogy any cautionary lesson, Kaplan is an enthusiastic cheerleader for what he baldly calls "American imperialism." He sees it as "humanitarian" and "righteous" and seems to never meet a Green Beret or marine he does not idolize. To Kaplan, U.S. imperialism is unquestionably selfless and heroic, trying only to bring a little taste of freedom to the huddled masses of the world. Imperial Grunts works well as a travelogue but fails to provide deeper insights--or opposing views--about the complex and fascinating places he explores. --Alex Roslin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



From Publishers Weekly

America is no less an imperial power than Britain and Rome in their times, claims veteran journalist Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, etc.)—one that is backed by the same sort of enforcers. To illustrate, he travels to seven nations and describes how American troops are, if not ruling the world, working to persuade it to follow our lead. The author joins elite units (generally marines or special forces) sent to shore up friendly governments, win people's hearts, train security forces and defeat terrorism—an increasingly vague term that includes narco-guerrillas, local warlords, unruly tribes and criminal gangs. Living among working soldiers, Kaplan makes no secret of his admiration for their camaraderie, practicality and rational if politically incorrect views. All roll their eyes when our leaders proclaim that defeating terrorism requires democratic governments; according to Kaplan, they believe this is nonsense in Colombia, Kenya, Yemen and the Philippines—all democracies. Forbidden to fight in these countries, Americans are building infrastructure and gathering intelligence as they instruct local units, hoping American-trained leaders will eventually rise to positions of authority. Military buffs will prefer the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan, where the soldiers are slugging it out. Stabilizing all these nations may take decades, these men and women say—except in Iraq, where it may take longer. (On sale Sept. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars American exceptionalism, April 26 2007
By Konstantin Smolski "tOnic" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
In a book almost entirely dedicated to the American War on Terror Kaplan allows himself a single sentence revealing that it was American money, arms and training that established the terrorist network the US is now fighting. Such manipulative presentation leads to a more serious problem in analysis. Kaplan argues for America's imperial preserve because of what he describes as "essential goodness of American nationalism." (p.257) Kaplan makes statements like "America's attempt to impose democracy," referring to the US invasion of Philippines. (p.144) He insists that the Filipinos, for their own cultural deficiencies, simply did not understand the particular kind of freedom the US wanted to bestow upon them. Kaplan defends the genocidal scale of the US slaughter and calculated starvation as the result of the "Philippine anarchy and misplaced American idealism," (p.144)
At the same time Kaplan condemns the "savagery" of other empires and conquerors. Kaplan refers the reader to the thirty million mines the Russians had left behind in Afghanistan (p.236). Kaplan speaks not of the US military, by its own account, dropping 1228 BLU97 cluster bombs on Afghanistan, each carrying 202 bomblets, up to 40% of which do not explode on impact and remain wrapped around fruit tree branches or strewn in fields and streets until they are detonated by curious children or a farmer's plough. He did not remind the reader about 120 tons of depleted uranium rounds used by the US in densely populated areas of Iraq. Though suffering from the dioxin-based Agent Orange is now inflicting fourth generation of Vietnamese victims, American exceptionalism allows us to overlook such sadism. Kaplan holds up the US assault on Hue as a "glorious chapter in Marine history," condemning Russian siege of Groznyi as "slaughter." (p.350) Are we to believe that American heavy artillery is somehow more discriminate than Russian? He mentions the US experience in Mogadishu without describing how cornered Green Berets slaughtered anywhere between 1000 and 10000 Somalis---all of them presumably Aidid's henchmen---as they shot their way out of the city. Kaplan argues that all this American brutality had been sanctified by what he termed the "democratic consultation." (p.364) Apparently Michael Gordon's New York Times stories of aluminium tubes and the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident are all the course of this legitimizing process.
Kaplan is as lost in Iraq as is the US military. It is indeed an account of an embedded journalist; vague and ignorant of Iraq's societal condition. "In truth, Iraq in 2003 and 2004 was less a replay of Vietnam than of the Indian Mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858..." (p.368) Iraq of 2003-04 was a replay of the British occupation of 1920's, of which Kaplan utters not a word while constantly digressing to recount Biblical Sumer. He arrives at the conclusion that Iraqis are incapable of accepting the "fruits of Western civilization" (p.368) because of their tribal inferiority and intrinsic corruptibility instilled by decades of tyranny. Absent from the account of course is the CPA, which Kaplan regards as "the new democratic order." (p.344) Corruption, malign and incompetence within this colonial entity was truly staggering. Unlike the Iraqi nation it was not burdened by historic cultural deficiencies other than being staffed by sloth Republican party loyalists and convicted felons. As the day of the hand over neared, the CPA had not managed to provide even the most basic of services to the Iraqis, yet Paul Bremer still managed to dispatch almost all of the $20 billion of Iraq's Oil for Food money into the black hole of fiscal and fiduciary unaccountability.
The rise of Islamism in Iraq is a development Kaplan neither understands nor describes in the book. With their society collapsing under the ruthless sanctions regime instituted after the Gulf War, the Iraqi people had turned to religion on mass to escape the ravages of their existence. After the Saddam regime had gone, with the country in utter ruin, Islam had filled the void that American "colonialism" never could. (p.169) Poverty and despair is the force that drives people to radical Islam in the Middle East and into the swelling ranks of the Christian Dominionists in America. When Kaplan calls the people of Fallujah "lumpen faithful" (p.356), without realizing, he is in effect referring to the "southern evangelicals" he so admires, who are induced by the same pathology of sectarianism and jingoism. Louis San Clair had said that "when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag carrying a cross." Kaplan identifies this condition as "unapologetic literal belief in God, which endows the grunts with stores of compassion."(p.365)
Iraqi casualties never concern Kaplan. In his account of Fallujah the US 82nd airborne figures prominently, but not the incident that introduced the US "liberators" to the people of that town. When the 2nd brigade of the 82nd took over a local school as its headquarters the residents of Fallujah demonstrated on April 28, 2003. The US soldiers opened fire killing 15 and wounding 75 demonstrators.
The US Empire is different from all others, Kaplan argues, because its goal is to "spread" or at least "impose" democracy. One of the most desperate examples of the US-imposed democracy, not recounted in the book, was its "nation-fixing" effort in El Salvador.(p,68) In 1982 those Salvadorans who did not vote in the mandatory elections and did not display a stamp in their identification papers proving their participation risked ending up a mutilated corps in a gutter. At that time the US-backed death squads were killing up to 800 "subversives" a month. `Empire' and `democracy' are terms mutually exclusive, but in the context of global US power Kaplan uses them interchangeably. The means with which empires propagate their interests are coercion and violence, whether manifested through Soviet tanks in Budapest or the murderous Contras in Nicaragua. True freedom and democracy can not be "imposed" at the point of a bayonet, or "spread" in the wake of passing armoured brigades---a concept absolutely alien to Kaplan.
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