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Anti-Imperialists Beware - Bush Is Reading Again
Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - The Reader-in-Chief is at it again, and anti-imperialists around the world have reason to be concerned.

According to the White House, U.S. President George W. Bush has taken two books with him to Texas for his holiday reading, which he will presumably indulge between his favourite ranch pursuits -- clearing brush and biking.

The first is about his most admired role model, Theodore Roosevelt, the other on the wonders being achieved by U.S. soldiers around the world.

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The second book on Bush's reading list, "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" by Robert Kaplan is far more worrisome in its implications, at least for the remaining three years of his presidency.

Kaplan, who began his career as a self-described "travel writer" in the 1980s, has evolved into a political thinker whose outlook is explicitly imperialist -- a term that he has used and re-used in recent years with unabashed approval -- and, in the words of one conservative reviewer and retired Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, "reactionary".

In his view (and one that would be shockingly familiar to Roosevelt in his "Rough Riding" days in Cuba more than 100 years ago), the "war on terror" and associated conflicts is simply a repeat of the U.S. Army's Indian Wars, but on a nearly planetary scale.

Instead of the Great Plains and western reaches of the 19th century U.S., however, today's "Injun Country", as Kaplan calls it, consists of the entire Islamic world, from the southern Philippines to Mauritania, as well as other un-governed or misgoverned areas in desperate need of order and civilisation.

And who best to civilise these places and their inhabitants than the U.S. military, specifically the "imperial grunts" with whom Kaplan embedded himself -- no doubt with the enthusiastic support of the Pentagon and probably Rumsfeld himself -- for weeks at a time in various parts of the world on three continents, and who, not incidentally, bear a striking resemblance to Bush's own self-image?

In contrast to the "elites" and "global cosmopolitans" who dominate the media, the State Department, Washington think tanks and academia, and the Democratic Party, these soldiers are "people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty", according to Kaplan.

He offers remarkable praise for the war-fighting traditions of "the gleaming officers corps of the Confederacy" -- that is, the military arm of the slave-owning southern states, including Bush's Texas, during the Civil War -- and for the present-day "martial evangelicalism of the South".

In a "Hobbesian world" where U.S. military commands and deployments span every continent, U.S. imperialism is not a choice, but rather a necessity, just as it was for the British in the late 19th century, according to Kaplan, who argues that Washington's "righteous responsibility (is) to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos".

In one telling piece of analysis, he describes the presumed thoughts of a Filipino in Zamboanga, presumably a descendant of Moro who resisted, at the cost of tens of thousands of their lives, U.S. imperialism 100 years ago: "His smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism."

With a message like that, it's not difficult to imagine Bush, who has met with Kaplan at least once before in the White House, requesting a return visit, in which case it may be useful to review the kinds of policy recommendations he is likely to make.

A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq now, Kaplan has predicted, would result in a "real bloodbath" and a reversal of liberalisation in the Arab world, including the reconstitution of Lebanon by the Syrians "in their own totalitarian image".

He has also cautioned against China's growing political and economic clout in the world. "Unless we begin military cooperation with Indonesia, for instance, at some point the Indonesian military will be captured by the Chinese in some form." *****