A friend, reading Weiss on Robert Kaplan and Jeffrey Goldberg, writes:
One other thing to take into account with Goldberg and Kaplan. To both of them,
war is a turn-on. This predilection sharpens their interest in the fortunes of
the modern Sparta, which is Israel. And it is an element of their enthusiasm
for Israel’s wars. Remember the rhapsody about the many kinds of guns in
Israel, in Goldberg’s memoir Prisoners–an involuntary self-parody of this
state of mind. And Kaplan spoke with admiration of the lusty American soldiers
with whom he rode shotgun as they attacked Arab strongholds which they referred
to as "Injun Country."
The book, Imperial Grunts, in which Kaplan introduced that new use of an
old phrase, contains a revealing one-sentence panegyric on the American empire
in 2002: "By the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States military
had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most
obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice." Note the tone: sheer
appreciation of a marvelous marvel. The same pleasure in the idea of military
power and the anticipated spectacle of destruction was the motive of Kaplan’s
dry bombing-run over probable American targets in Iran–the subject of an
excited article in The Atlantic two years ago.
The state of mind is susceptible of genteeler turns; but if patriotism is the
melody, war is always the undersong. Recall for example George Packer’s New
York Times Magazine column "Recapturing the Flag," in September 2001. Packer
there went further, in a programmatic sense, than either Goldberg or Kaplan.
He wrote of an "instinct for the battlefield" which (he had found as a young
man) nothing in liberal politics could satisfy. But "Sept. 11 changed all that,
instantly." And: "What I dread now is a return to the normality we’re all
supposed to seek: instead of public memorials, private consumption; instead of
lines to give blood, restaurant lines." He went on to quote, to misleading
effect, William James on our duty to "inflame the civic temper as past history
has inflamed the military temper." James was speaking of the moral equivalent
of war; Packer was pushing for war. And he, like Goldberg and Kaplan, testified
to a craving not just for this or that war, but for war itself as an experience
that searches the truest of human emotions and offers the most irrefutable test
of self-sacrifice.
"Giving blood" (also shedding blood)–not "standing in restaurant lines." The
severity of Sparta, not the decadence of Athens. It is a feeling one wields as
a moral axe–on oneself and on one’s neighbors, but only for a time. A state of
irresolute satisfaction peculiar to Americans who would like to be Israelis but
prefer to live in America.
