There are two famous clichés about foreign wars and domestic politics.
The first of course is emblazoned by Vietnam, where the war that goes wrong over there comes back home to task our very souls. Perhaps it leads to a constitutional crisis narrowly averted, like Watergate. Perhaps, like the Mexican War did for our Civil War, it helps make gathering crisis inevitable.
On the other hand, there is the "Good War." The Good War, like World War II, turns young soldiers into future leaders, ensuring wise political stewardship to come.
Robert Kaplan believes, clearly, in the latter cliché. In his Los Angeles Times' commentary, "The Future of America -- in Iraq," he spells it out right up front: America's political future lies in the steady, capable hands of junior officers fighting today in Iraq.
But here he also breaks stride with tradition, and offers us a new vision of America's future. It is not, in his view, that Iraq veterans will simply be ordinary men and women tempered by war, who thus naturally acquire the superb character needed to lead our nation in some yet-to-be peacetime.
Rather, Kaplan affirms that the specific talents and abilities that they are learning in bringing democracy to Iraq -- and bringing it as soldiers -- will be their primary qualification to lead our nation:
"In the decades ahead, they will represent something uncommon in U.S. military history: war veterans with practical experience in democratic governance, learned under the most challenging of conditions."
Kaplan's reverie suggests a future America where only such men and women can properly lead us -- a provocative canvas that he fills in by obliquely answering three questions:
What are our soldiers doing in Iraq? What sort of leaders does this make them? What sort of America will require such skills and such virtue?
What are our soldiers doing in Iraq? Kaplan describes their political effectiveness with the same loving condescension that Kipling might have lavished on a young British civil servant, wisely ruling over those inhabiting a less developed world. Not quite primitives, not quite children, but nonetheless natives in sore need of "tutelage." Kaplan is all Kipling as he frames his "grunts" tutoring Iraqis in democracy.
Kaplan glowingly describes how these soldiers made elections happen in Iraq. Here he parrots the administration's message that elections are Democracy's jewel. But his image goes beyond this. Making elections happen becomes a transcendent act of military will. Thus the "struggle" of our soldiers in Iraq becomes a sort of democratic triumph of the will, through which "intractable cultural and political realities of a world that the U.S. seeks to remake in its own image" are indeed transformed.
What sort of leaders does this make them? Given their gritty and yet exalted mission, they are in Kaplan's words nothing short of "military soldier-statesmen." Think of them as the New Model American leadership class. Moreover to Kaplan they are "stripped of ideology." Now this is on the face of it a puzzling term, inasmuch as the vast majority of junior officers at least are fervent supporters of the administration, which is a most ideological enterprise indeed.
Here we must refer to the deeper Kaplan worldview. In his writings, and his remarks in speeches and interviews, it is clear that Kaplan sees war as a purifying experience, in contrast to peacetime's "numbing and corrosive illusion." He is fond of quoting Churchill that "a great power, if it doesn't have something to struggle for, it will slide into decadence and partisanship."
To Kaplan, those of us who haven't fought are "not fully American." Worse, those "elites" wrangling "in Washington and New York seminars" embody the decadence and partisanship that threatens American greatness.
In noble contrast, our junior and field grade officers are doing the business of running and tutoring the world: "This effectively makes them the keepers of our values and agents of our imperium."
So it is clear. When Kaplan speaks of our soldiers as "stripped of ideology" he means that battle has cleansed them of "decadence and partisanship." They now, in other words, politically inhabit a state of PURE VIRTUE.
Furthermore, in Kaplan's eye the truest of these young soldiers hail from what is left of the still unsullied, stoic heartland of American virtue: from "family farms." How few remain who still embody this "frontier ethos" to preserve American greatness!
What sort of America will require such skills and such virtue? What can be concluded from these sentiments save that Kaplan believes, by extension, that America is in need of cleansing politics?
Kaplan clearly believes that war -- in democratic American hands -- is a virtuous enterprise. He believes moreover that war keeps American democracy virtuous. Thus war and democracy form a living circle. American "greatness" cannot long survive without both in constant, healthy harmony.
This health and harmony must be restored by the entry of today's veterans into American politics, and indeed to dominate those politics much as they dominated after the Civil War and World War II. But here Kaplan does not compare us today to that other America, and with good reason. Both the Civil War and World War II mobilized American society, and in both cases veterans were the inevitable future of national politics.
From what we can see of Kaplan's worldview, he views America today as a benevolent world empire, or rather two empires: The Globe and the American Realm. As Kaplan describes for us in An Empire Wilderness, the old American society and polity are fragmenting. Thus a soldier-class implicitly is the only virtuous counter-balance to "decadent and partisan" rule by "elites."
Therefore it is not so much that war -- in and of itself -- purifies and sustains democratic virtue. It is rather that war is the necessary vehicle for preserving American democracy: in the form of a virtuous ruling class of democratic warriors.
These soldiers, in Kaplan's canvas, not only run the world but also will serve to redeem a wayward and increasingly fragmented American society. War abroad is the vehicle for our domestic deliverance. Virtue is preserved throughout by their willingness to sacrifice themselves: "they are absolutely committed to U.S. success ... no matter the cost to themselves." Or in one soldier's words: "I am willing to die for a country that is not my own."
To Kaplan the soldiers that represent such righteousness, that arise from a pure and stoic heartland to take up the sword, who live in virtue, who sacrifice themselves for the larger community, and through their sacrifice renew and restore the whole -- this is the sort of narrative used so effectively by National Socialism in the last century.
I do not believe for a moment that Bob Kaplan shares such an iron dream. But his reverie of an America-to-be also powerfully mirrors, in its themes and language, another vision, the vision of yet another righteous movement in unswerving pursuit of virtue ...
The vision of our Muslim enemies.