How can it be, in 2004, that a major American newspaper will so blatantly publish such a wrongheaded play on historical Indian wars and the current military strategic debate? To casually connect, as Kaplan takes for a given, the current war on ''terrorism'' with the wars of extermination conducted by the United States at various points in the past against American Indian nations is an historical insult. It feeds the heart-wrenching realization that American public discourse is increasingly revisionist, distorted, inherently biased and so self-absorbed in its own supremacist thinking that it can only become the object of world condemnation.
Kaplan's argument, such as it is, is worth engaging and rebutting, starting as it does with the assumption that what was done to Indians was the right thing to do. Kaplan's casual justification for genocide is, again, deeply disturbing.
Considering that we are seeing this line of reasoning in The Wall Street Journal, forgive us our here-we-go-again attitude. However, the public record must be corrected with a more principled and accurate reporting and scholarship. The Journal has published more consistent diatribe against American Indians than any other major print publication in recent years. Anything nasty that can be found or told or implied about tribal American Indian nations, including not a few falsehoods, Journal editorial editors have seen fit to print in the former venerable conservative newspaper.
Kaplan, a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, might have known better. But his assumptions embody too cynical a version of American political identity, and so virulently, they shock any sense of comfort we might have had this past week in the American public discourse. This article - completely dismissive of any fair assessment of Indian history - coincided with the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian on the nation's National Mall. This is the new Smithsonian ''jewel,'' to quote Republican Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, which will receive over 4 million visitors annually. Last week, too, President George W. Bush hosted a large delegation of Native leadership, and, for the first time, forcefully reaffirmed the sovereign nature of Native tribal nations, reiterating as well tribal government-to-government relations with the federal government. Republican legislators, from John McCain to J.D. Hayworth join the many Democratic voices who speak of America's ''sordid history'' with Native peoples, and support the current efforts - in economics, education and political rights - to help counteract 200 years of miserable and contradictory U.S. government policies that supported outright theft with policies of persecution, massacre and encirclement. Sen. John Kerry's American Indian platform is one of the most enlightened on record. So while the country as a whole moves in an honorable direction of advancing beyond baseless assumptions, The Wall Street Journal harkens for those days when simplistic and self-serving ideology passed for intelligence.
Admittedly, Kaplan's primary argument focused on the principles and practices of a quieter, leaner and meaner U.S. military posture around the world. Kaplan writes about the need for the U.S. military to transform itself from a ''dinosauric, Industrial Age beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla warfare, attuned to the local environment.'' Interestingly, Kaplan concedes and uses as base of his argument that Iraq was a loss. He writes that American military interventions are best, ''light, not 130,000, as in Iraq,'' which ''constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat - regardless of one's position on the war.''
Of course, the argument that an invasion of Iraq would become a mess, was in fact a clear position before the invasion. It was viciously attacked as ''unpatriotic.'' But then The Wall Street Journal contributor drops the neo-con hammer: ''In the way of the 19th-century Apaches ... the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians.''
With a nod to the ''liberal policy nomenklatura,'' for his use of the ''red Indian'' metaphor and claiming that the use is meant as ''reverence for them [presumably Indians],'' Kaplan launches into his argument, framing the war of terrorism as the re-conquering of ''Indian Country,'' a term U.S. soldiers have used since the Indian wars of the 19th century in referring to enemy territory.
This use of ''Indian Country'' is highly offensive in itself, but it only tips the iceberg of Kaplan's fallaciously flawed thinking. ''When the Cavalry invested Indian encampments,'' Kaplan writes breezily, ''they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah.''
''Much like Fallujah,'' he writes. Can Kaplan not see how vicious this is? What a terrible signal it sends to the American mind? ''... Most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants ...,'' Kaplan feigns sensitivity, but ''inevitable civilian casualties'' happened.
To continue: ''The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry forage for horses ... Had it not been for a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad, security never would have been brought to the Old West.''
This is either patently ignorant of the historical reality or simply cynical. In either case, it is wrong. Security for whom, for the settlers who were stealing Indian lands? For the miners illegally entering treaty-guaranteed tribal territory? Fact: in the so-called ''settling of the West,'' the U.S. cavalry went ahead and behind the settlers, conducting large and small military clean-up campaigns. The U.S. cavalry, though occasionally defeated, sustained campaigns so unrelenting and large and well equipped that they ultimately starved and decimated the valiant Indian bands of warriors who fought for their traditional homelands while attempting to protect their women and children from harm.
Kaplan makes a reasonable case for a leaner American fighting force, intelligently rejecting the notion of invading nation-states such as Afghanistan and Iraq, which leave behind restricted, easily ambushed American forces. It is how he identifies the terrorist enemy to be killed, as synonymous with Indian peoples and Indian country, that speaks volumes about his mindset and that of Journal's editors. How he easily glosses over the true history of the unrelenting attack on Indian peoples - conducted to steal their rightful lands and resources - in order to reflect a shadowy but politically prominent set of assumptions about the current problem of fundamentalist terrorism, this is troubling and divisive.
To repeat the truth: The incidence of massacre of whole villages and bands and families of Indian peoples was commonplace and even customary in the so-called ''taming'' of the American continent. Massacres by soldiers and civilians was the norm; often protected by policy it happened a lot, to every Indian people, peaceful or not, in every decade. What happened to Indian communities was as vicious and unjustified as the infamous lynchings in the American South by the Ku Klux Klan. The sense of superiority and brutal discrimination was the same only that in the case of Indian tribal nations it was enforced by a willing and consistent use of massive military and civilian violence.
Those unfortunate Indian ''collateral'' deaths of yesteryear's imperial warfare, laments Kaplan, as his argument unfolds, ''raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East ... In Indian Country, it is not only the outbreak of a full-scale insurgency that must be avoided, but the arrival in significant numbers of the global media,'' he writes. Ergo, the loss of U.S. military control in Iraq, or elsewhere, is the fault of those who would object to the use of more ''realistic'' military methods that might kill civilians en-masse, require the use of torture, targeted assassination, and so on.
Kaplan's commentary is part of books in progress on the U.S. military's strategic approaches to current warfare. He is likely onto something in that thematic, even if severely over-enthusiastic for an American imperial mission. His appropriation of the term ''Indian Country'' and his all-too-facile assumptions on the justifications and methodologies of warfare against American Indian peoples, however, are seriously flawed and at times incoherent. We urge author Kaplan to reconsider his approach and definitions of the term and the never-ending hostility that those imply for the real and still-remembering people of Indian country.