Interview with Robert Kaplan

The American Enterprise magazine interviews Robert Kaplan.

TAE: Is Islam a religion of peace, or is there is a bellicose spirit right at the heart of Islam?

Kaplan: Islam is a religion that’s willing to fight. It’s a great religion for poor, downtrodden people, and there are so many around the world. It’s direct. It’s stark. It’s in a specific language. The Koran has fewer ambiguities than other religious texts. In a way, it’s very populist. It actively proselytizes. And even though I wouldn’t call it a war-like religion, it can adjust itself to war more easily than others.

But Old Testament-oriented Christianity can also do that. The Old Testament is all fire and brimstone, while the New Testament is more milk and honey. And evangelicals put a significant emphasis on the Old Testament.

TAE: Where are the moderate Muslims today? Why don’t we hear more from them after outrages are committed in the name of Islam?

Kaplan: I think they’ll be more outspoken if we can stick it out in Iraq. Look at the fact that some Sunnis were bombing mosques during Ramadan. How come nobody’s protesting in the Arab world? But once our success is assured, I think they’ll speak up.

Meanwhile, we do have Ayatollah Sistani. If Nobel Peace Prizes actually went to people who deserved them, it would have gone to him this year. Sistani exercised tremendous enlightened restraint in the face of so much violent provocation, and he really kept his community together. I do think we’ve gotten lucky with the Shiite leadership in southern Iraq.

TAE: You’ve argued that Democrats will not be trusted to wield the sword of U.S. national defense so long as a fierce U.S. combat soldier who draws inspiration from the Bible is something that makes them uncomfortable. Why are the Democrats seen as so weak on national security, and will that change?

Kaplan: Look at last year’s election, which, to a certain extent, was a referendum on the Iraq war. More than 70 percent of active-duty military personnel, Reserve, and Guard voted for the Republicans. And from my anecdotal experience—which was with the front line infantry and the Special Forces, who have always been more conservative—the Republicans probably received more than 90 percent of the vote.

With numbers like those, you have to ask yourself why. It wasn’t for policy reasons; a lot of people in the barracks will openly say that Bush and Rumsfeld made a number of mistakes. It was cultural. People in the military don’t feel like the Democrats are one of them. They feel as if the Democrats are from another America—from the same America as the elite media.

So the Democrats have a cultural hurdle to overcome, and it’s essential for the well-being of our democracy that they overcome it. A two-party democracy is only as strong as the opposition party, and if the opposition party simply can’t get elected, then the party in power starts performing worse and worse because it doesn’t feel the competition. It’s happened in other democracies, and I’m afraid of this happening in the U.S.

It’s also important that the military doesn’t become associated for too long with one political party. But for that to change, the Democrats must overcome their cultural problems. And generally speaking, that means changing their skewed ideas of what it means to be a Southerner or an evangelical in uniform.