please somebody convince me i'm not losing my mind?...RE: Robert Kaplan...

Robert Kaplan...i'v read all his books over the years ..."Balkan Ghosts," "The Ends of the Earth" and "The Coming Anarchy. " this creepy man wrote the "Balkan Ghosts" 3 years before all hell broke out in the balklans...then he wrote "the ends of the earth" about subsaharian africa liberia, siera leone and afghanistan/iraq/iran and and all hell breaks out 3 years later....next he wrote "the comming anarchy"....and it is all happening right now3 years later - total choas ...call me crazy but this so called journalist who ...ahem...supposedly packpacks through all these countries but hobnobs with the ambassordors and heads of states of these countries and writes about them ...then the DOD and the Pentagon read and or helps publish them and follows what he writes as if it were Holy Scripture...is to god damn scary!

Has anyone else read these books???? somebody please read them and tell me i'm not insane?

sure it's a good read, but in terms of factuality and actually learning anything about the Balkans it's absolutely awful. Anyone who actually knows anything about the Balkans agrees, and reviews of the book by specialists panned it.

Basically, this guy is a profiteer, he takes situations that americans know little to nothing about, and then spins them in a really doom and gloom, almost racist way, portraying the problems as almost totally due to culture. Of course what does that leave out.... Yes, multinational corporation economic power, IMF/World Bank interference in all of these places, etc.

He's just plain bad news. He's running cover for the bad guys in the world, deflecting attention from what they're doing and the f***-ups they're causing...

</rant>

like it is somehow good...i believe that he works for the PNACers really i do ...thank you

He's a doozy alright.

You were referring to http://slate.msn.com/id/2087174/">this, right?

dude (i think he has something to do with wallstreet)and the other the journalist/packpacker

if it's the one I think you mean... (I screwed up the link in my above post...)
correct Slate link

I haven't read "Balkan Ghosts", but I've read "The Coming Anarchy", "The Ends of the Earth", and "Eastward to Tartary". I've found all of them interesting, although I don't always agree with Kaplan's political perspectives. I don't see any broad conspiracy though - Kaplan simply puts himself into some of the world's more unstable and troubled places and writes about what he observes. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Ends of the Earth", he finds that much of what he observes doesn't fit his original preconceptions.

One of Kaplan's more interesting notions is that you can't simply impose representative democracy on a society ex nihlio, rather, democracy has to develop organically after a society has met certain conditions: a stable middle class, a certain literacy rate, a functional banking system, a judicial system relatively free from corruption, an absence of ethnic animosity, etc. That is, for places like Iraq, most of Central Asia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, attempts to impose democracy by fiat are doomed to fail until other conditions are met first. It's certainly a debatable point, but one that probably hasn't gotten as much consideration as it should within government circles lately.

-SM

Basically, he states that the US should try to be like Imperial Rome in the 2nd century AD. At first I thought he was kidding and just trying to rile people up a bit, but I'm starting to suspect that he's serious.

I haven't been studying that historial period for very long, but it seems to me that he glosses it over quite a bit -- and makes a lot of assumptions considering that the records are nowhere near complete, for different parts of the Empire and also for the century as a whole (and the lives of everyday people, say Roman soldiers and officers in the army which Kaplan thinks America should imitate).

The Washington Post printed an article a while back, that someone gave Bush a copy of Kaplan's "Eastward to Tartary" to read, prior to 9/11, and it scared the **** out of him. And since Bush didn't have the background and insight to come up with rebuttals, that's the world view he adopted, uncritically.

One example ... in the "Rome" article, he goes on and on about how great it would be to have Special Forces operatives in place to be information conduits and "informal" alternatives to getting things done. He doesn't mention that there were some spectacular cock-ups in the British and Roman empires regarding exactly these types of people. I kept wanting to ask him, "What about those 3 legions that were massacred in Germany by "friendly" auxiliaries who had been trained by the Romans, then decided to rebel?"
*What bets Lionel Chetwynd, Bush's Hollywood buddy, isn't going to be backing this particular project?
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Salon/2385/varus.html

He seems to think that all Green Berets/Rangers are going to be like the heroic and street-smart "Stalky" in Kipling's stories about the British Raj, and that ain't necessarily so.

I'm not disagreeing with his assertion that it helps to know about history, but making the same mistakes over again (Arminius, then bin Laden?) seems a bad idea.

Robert Kaplan writes that Muslim people aren't really wired for democracy.

He's developed a thesis over the last nine years that democracy doesn't always play well in the third world, and that the best we can hope for in the short run are more benign dictators. Kaplan believes that the United States probably should invade Iraq, but that any hope of establishing a democratic government is naïve.

i guess he didn't give bush* this one tho :shrug:
oh wait.. i forgot karen's not around to read to him anymore
never mind

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19626-2002Feb16

http://shockandawe.us/archives/911/news/f17b.htm


The reason I remember .... in a course I teach, we have the students read the Coming Anarchy (not the book, the earlier article Kaplan did) and then we discuss the points where he changed his mind later on, and some of the criticism (from both the left and right) that's followed.

Hi Lisa! :-)

The Washington Post printed an article a while back, that someone gave Bush a copy of Kaplan's "Eastward to Tartary" to read, prior to 9/11, and it scared the **** out of him. And since Bush didn't have the background and insight to come up with rebuttals, that's the world view he adopted, uncritically.

Clinton is alleged to have been considerably influenced by "The Coming Anarchy", although it's not clear whether he was willing/able to translate that into any serious foreign policy intiatives (or whether it would have been at all wise to do so...)
Link #1

-SM

As we've found in the courses.

Thing is, Clinton and Bush would treat the book very differently. Clinton would want to dig into it and analyze it from various perspectives ... apparently he loves doing that kind of thing, just picking at arguments and throwing everything he's got at them.

Bush is so used to being handed summaries and not questioning them that he wouldn't be as liable to wonder about Kaplan's points and initial assumptions. And it's the wondering that is the most productive part of looking at Kaplan's stuff. Kaplan (and every other theorist I can name -- Diamond, Friedman, Ehrlich, Simon, Huntingdon) isn't all right, and he isn't all wrong. The challenge is to pick out what's strong and what's weak in the evidence he presents.

For those who are interested, here are links to his Roman stuff.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/kaplan.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/kaplan.htm
(evidently he was thinking about this prior to 9/11)

I'm the new historical consultant to a Roman re-enactment group (Legio XXX) that focuses on the 2nd century (there are so many groups doing the late 1st century that we're trying to branch out) -- so it's very interesting to me if anyone's trying to look into this period, which doesn't have as much documentation. (Especially military history.) And just from an academic/truth-telling perspective, I really want to know if this is going to be used to justify policies which a) may not be strictly parallel, and b) could end up being based on wishful thinking rather than real documentation.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/kaplan/kapbio.htm

Kaplan is a fellow of the New America Foudation(think tank), and a former senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (think tank). . . imho US foriegn policy is influenced greatly by what kaplan writes

Yeah, can't argue with that. Bush has a way of hearing what he wants to hear and ignoring the rest...

I definitely don't think that Kaplan should be rejected out of hand as some sinister neo-con backpacker menace, he at least acknowledges that there are complex reasons behind why some countries are impoverished and/or unstable, and refuses to invoke single, simplistic explanations (colonialism, ignorance, corruption, etc.) as people on both sides of the fence are prone to doing...

My (admittedly incomplete) opinion is that his analyses of extant conditions in the places he travels to are fairly insightful and sophisticated, but his proposed solutions (some of which you've described above...) aren't...

-SM

"his analyses of extant conditions in the places he travels to are fairly insightful and sophisticated, but his proposed solutions ... aren't ..."

I had the chance to read works written decades and even centuries ago by people like Gertude Bell, or some of the early Greek and Arab explorers ... totally agree with your assessment, Sufi Marmot. While it's possible for a visitor to write something that's charming, informative, and relatively even-handed (once one allows for particular attitudes and experiences) -- actually suggesting a workable solution to a local problem is a lot different, and is often where they trip up!

And to pick up from your point, it's not necessarily Kaplan himself who gets my goat ... but the people who pick out the parts they like and ignore the rest, as Rove and Bush are prone to doing. Agreed that he isn't as simplistic as some of the other writers who are looking for "The One Big Thing" that explains all conflict in the world, but he can be "cherry-picked" to sound like that if someone is so inclined, and he doesn't make a huge effort to qualify his findings (which might encourage his readers to do a bit of digging on their own).

BTW, I'll be laughing at your description of jack-booted neo-con backpackers all night ...