Akkam’s Razor

Bush, known as being uncurious and not one to read for either work or personal gain is reading two books - one focusing on his (Bush’s) role model, Teddy Roosevelt (ha-ha!), and the second focusing on an Imperialistic Vision of America focusing on a worldwide war on terror.  Link via Sploid:

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".

Some other Bush reading lists can be found here, here, here, here, and here.