Magic Hours (18 page)

Soldiers of God
, his next book, concerns Kaplan's travels with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. He admits in the foreword to the paperback version that he “was caught up in the struggle to liberate Afghanistan, and my lack of objectivity shows; nor was I fair to some people, or as critical of others, as I should have been.” Actually, Kaplan is fairer and more objective in this book than anywhere else. Nonetheless, he still defends his “brutal, tragic” position that U.S. policy in Afghanistan was morally appropriate: “The United States, in the 1980s, was doing what great powers have done throughout history.... A state that neglects the projection of power has little chance of spreading its values.” But surely foresight is called for while the great power in question is spreading its values. American “policy” in Afghanistan consisted
mainly of throwing guns and money at whichever nationalist, religious psychopath, or “commander” Pakistan's secret service put forth as a slayer of Communist infidels. To be sure, the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan was well deserved and did help hasten the collapse of the Soviet regime, but many CIA agents on the ground and even many Afghans warned the State Department that it was financing its own assassins. As is now abundantly clear, the United States' Afghanistan policy did not spread its values but undermine them.

Nevertheless,
Soldiers of God
is Kaplan's most well written book, his most empathetic, and his most humane. An early description of Kaplan's waltz through a Soviet minefield is a model of descriptive writing. His take on Afghan's guerrillas, while somewhat naive (as he himself admits), is, all the same, winningly honest: “Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to.” The other Kaplan, however, shoulders his way forward from time to time, as when he condemns “the elite establishment media and the new brand of 1980s foreign correspondents who stocked their fridges with Perrier water and talked incessantly of their computer modems.”

In
Soldiers of God
one finds what is surely a partial source of Kaplan's later unhingedness: “Away from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I could barely speak about the war. When I told people where I had been, their blank expressions indicated I might as well have been on the moon. Of the few who were truly interested in what I had to say, the retort that often greeted me was: ‘Really? Well then, how come we read so little about it in the newspapers?'” Never again, he surely decided, would people doubt why being concerned with strife in faraway places is important. Kaplan would make it important, even if that meant being disingenuous
and, indeed, often wrong about the places and conflicts he covered. Even if it meant
Balkan Ghosts.

Although it was widely acclaimed when published in 1993,
Balkan Ghosts
(called by Kaplan “an idiosyncratic travel book”) has over the years been savaged by many Balkan experts, and Kaplan himself has been blamed for President Clinton's hesitancy to intervene against the Serbs' slaughter of their Bosnian Muslim countrymen. Clinton, according to the political journalist Elizabeth Drew, used Kaplan's dour, hopeless portrayal of the region to justify American inaction. Kaplan laments this in a new foreword to the most recent paperback edition: “That policy makers, indeed a president, might rely on such a book in reaching a momentous military decision would be frightening, if true. My personal suspicion is that back in 1993, at the beginning of his term, Clinton had so little resolve that he was casting around for any excuse not to act.” This is doubly unfortunate, Kaplan writes, because “I myself have been a hawk on the issue” of intervening militarily in the Balkans.

One can tell the charge has stung him. “Neither Martians nor President Clinton killed Bosnians,” Kaplan writes. “Other Bosnians did.” This is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out. What is less reasonable is his belief that Bosnians killed other Bosnians because they had been programmed to do so by history and ethnicity. Kaplan can complain about the unwarranted aftereffects of
Balkan Ghosts
all he wants, but he is the man who salted his book with statements such as, “while the Greeks and the Macedonian Slavs despise each other, as Orthodox Christians they equally despise the Muslim Kosovars.” The metaphysics of what makes people suddenly garrote and rape their neighbors can be debated from now until the end of time, but to generalize so complacently gives hatred a mask that too many can hide behind. In Kaplan's telling, Balkan mass-murder was inevitable
and unsurprising, given the region's history. One wonders why, then, those who were slaughtered did not see it coming, and get out. “Nevertheless,” Kaplan writes in
Balkan Ghosts
's new foreword, “nothing I write should be taken as a justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn.” Here is a writer reassuring us that he does not think genocide is justifiable, and that he condemns it. Any book written in a way to require such a statement is on thin moral ice.

Once the book proper begins, Kaplan tells us, “The Balkans produced the century's first terrorists.” That is pretty definitively untrue, but at any rate terrorism is at least as old as warfare itself. Who gives a shit which region introduced it to the twentieth century? “Even the fanaticism of the Iranian clergy has a Balkan precedent.” It also has an American, English, Russian, French, and Spanish precedent. “Twentieth-century history came from the Balkans. Here men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate.” In Carinthia, Austria's southernmost province, Kaplan notes that “a shop sold women's undergarments from Paris that were as expensive as they were naughty. The perfume worn by the blond shop girl had a sweaty, animal scent.” Could this be a quirk of Kaplan's inquisitive sniffer? No. You see, “The offspring of the SS have become expensively groomed, performing tigers, safely tucked away in middle-class box houses... Carinthians have become a tamed species.” It takes a special kind of man to waltz into a foreign city, tar the entire populace as recessive Nazis, and then refer to them as animals.

This is to say nothing of the book's prose, which is incurably bad, as in this barroom scene: “Men had their arms around the oily backsides of women.” Arms around their oily backsides? How does that work, exactly? “There were shouts and laughter, and almost every one of the red velvet chairs was occupied. A massive
wall-to-wall mirror reflected the filmy bath of cigarette smoke.” Filmy bath of cigarette smoke? “I felt an intensity of emotion, a fleshy intimacy, that seemed to be based on confinement and therefore could never be duplicated in the West.” So: he is having an orgasm? “While extramarital affairs in the West were mainly a result of middle-class boredom, here I felt they served deeper needs. With politics and public life so circumscribed, there was a huge well of authentic emotion that even the most ideal of marriages could never consume.” I have no idea what this passage even
thinks
it means.

When he reaches Greece, where he lived for several years, Kaplan chides scholars for ignoring “the most recent 2,000 years of Greek history... in favor of an idealized version of ancient Greece, a civilization that had already died before Jesus' birth.” But this is precisely Kaplan's technique in looking upon the rest of the world: Find one epoch, fixate upon it, project outward in the most intellectually irresponsible method imaginable.

 

 

Some truly nutty books followed
Balkan Ghosts,
among them
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
(2002) and
An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future
(1998). What
Warrior Politics
really gives Kaplan is the chance to show what he and a bunch of geniuses have in common. First, Churchill, whose “unapologetic warmongering arose not from a preference for war, but from a breast-beating Victorian sense of imperial destiny—amplified by what Isaiah Berlin calls a rich historical imagination.” That sort of sounds like someone we know. Onto Livy, whose “factual errors and romantic view of the Roman Republic should not dissuade us from his larger truths.” Sound familiar? Then Hobbes, whose “concepts are difficult to grasp for the urban middle class, who have long since lost any contact with man's natural state. But
however culturally and technologically advanced a society is, it will endure and remain civil only so long as it can in some way imagine man's original condition.” What original condition might that be—throwing spears at woolly mammoths? Kaplan does not understand man's original condition any better than this so-called “urban middle class,” which is just a bit more diverse than Kaplan imagines. Malthus, then, who “was humiliated by the literary elite of the day, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley” Did Malthus go to a “non-prestigious” college too?

Along the way Kaplan writes, “The short, limited wars and rescue operations with which we shall be engaged will... feature warriors on one side, motivated by grievance and rapine, and an aristocracy of statesmen, military officers, and technocrats on the mother, motivated, one hopes, by ancient virtue.” What ancient virtue is that? Achilles disfiguring Hector? Consulting a haruspex about whether to invade Syria? Using an executioner class of soldiers to slaughter men who have surrendered, as was the rule of ancient warfare?

At the end of the book, he imagines a “nontraditional American-led empire,” which would mean... what? “The power of this new imperium will derive from it never having to be declared.... Joseph Nye Jr., dean of Harvard's Kennedy School, speaks of ‘soft' American hegemony.” But if men are essentially and savagely unchanged, if we need to know about our elusive mammoth-hunting “original state” to understand how craven people are, what possible guarantee is there that this American hegemony
will
be soft? That Kaplan can quote John Adams saying that “there is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others,” shows something quite distressing: Not even
he
understands what he writes.

Amazingly,
An Empire Wilderness
is even worse. This book followed
The Ends of the Earth
—Kaplan's account of a world riven by
ethnic tension and unstable governments—and describes his journeys around the American West. What does Kaplan find? Ethnic tension and unstable governments, what he calls the “coming medievalization of the continent.” Renaissance fairs and President E. Gary Gygax? No, he means the “globalized settlement” like the one he finds in Kansas City, with its “cappuccinos, French pastries, and designer seafood in the midst of the formerly beef-eating prairie.”
Designer
seafood? The prairie itself ate beef? He has dinner at a “Eurobistro,” and wonders “if traditional patriotism may become a waning formality.... How much longer, I wondered, will the patriotic marches of John Philip Sousa move America's inhabitants?”

On he goes, antennae bristling for all indications of the deSousafication of the American landmass. In a Los Angeles restaurant, he finds a crowd that is “young, heavily Oriental, and fiercely middle-class. . . . I sat down at an outdoor Thai-Chinese restaurant for an early dinner. The manager was Japanese, the hostess Iranian, and the other help Mexican immigrants.” He walks into a Chinese grocery and says, “I could have been in Hong Kong or Taiwan.” If he had continued and said, “or in a Chinese grocery in Los Angeles,” he might have been onto something. He goes to Orange County, which he “was prepared to hate,” but his visit to the Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach leaves him “as impressed as I had been when I had seen the great squares of medieval Bukhara and Samarkand,” and God help him. In Orange County, however, he has one big question: “Will this place fight for its country? Are these people loyal to anything except themselves?.... Rather than citizens, the inhabitants of these prosperous pods are, in truth, resident expatriates, even if they were born in America, with their foreign cuisines, eclectic tastes, exposure to foreign languages, and friends throughout the world.” Friends! How dare they.

Kaplan then surveys the Arizona-Mexico border. On the Mexican side are a bunch of Mexicans. On the American side
people are speaking Spanish, “but to me they might as well have been speaking English. Whether it was the high quality of their leisure clothes, their purposeful stride—indicating that they were going somewhere, rather than just hanging out—the absence of hand movements when they talked... they seemed to me thoroughly
modern
compared to the Spanish speakers” over in You Know Where. (The italics, I swear, are his.)

At a basketball game in Tucson, Kaplan notices that “the entire crowd, as well as every cheerleader, was white, in many cases with honey-blond hair, while almost everyone playing on the court was black. Wasn't this a bit like ancient Rome, in which the gladiators were often from ‘barbarian,' that is, subject races?” I recall having a similar realization of this “blunt racial fact,” in Kaplan's words, at about twelve years of age at the Mecca in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, watching the Bucks lose to the Cavs. I have to admit, though, I never took it this far: “The shrieking blond crowd and the sweating black players may indicate a society's way of coping with racial tensions rather than dramatizing them.” Or it may indicate Robert D. Kaplan's racism as he thoughtlessly compares perspiring black Americans to barbarians.

On a Greyhound bus this man who survived Ethiopia and Afghanistan nearly goes to pieces among what he calls the “Greyhound underclass.” They are fat, and loud, and Jesus Christ, could someone please shut up those bawling kids? “Can democracy flourish among people like this?” he wonders. When he gets near Canada, he makes a startling discovery: “Canada can't hold together,” he for some reason quotes a former mayor of Missoula, Montana, as saying. Kaplan agrees that things look pretty bleak for Canada, and writes, “So far, most Americans have not thought much about the psychological effect of the peaceful disintegration of an entire Atlantic-to-Pacific middle-class nation on their northern border.” There is at least one
obvious reason why they have not much thought about this. In Vancouver, Kaplan writes, “we may be seeing something else, too: the erotization of race.” The reader leans forward; this will surely be priceless. “As another Vancouverite told me, if you walk down the street and look at who's holding hands with whom, you'll observe that whites find Asians, particularly Asian women, with their small-boned symmetricality, highly desirable.” I hear they have tiny little snatches, too. “Still,” Kaplan says, “Vancouver has something special, a cohesiveness evinced by the never-empty streets and interracial couples: people would fight for this, I thought.” Great. But are they not Canadian? And isn't Canada doomed? What if they fight us?