US President George W Bush has taken two books with him to Texas for his holiday reading. The first is about his most admired role model, Theodore Roosevelt, the other on the wonders being achieved by US soldiers around the world.

As the US was gearing up for war in Iraq in 2002, reporters noticed that Bush had tucked a rather scholarly book, “Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime”, a book by Elliot Cohen, a neo-conservative military historian. The book argued that great leaders made far better commanders than the generals. It was perfectly timed for persuading Bush to stand up to the recommendations of the top brass that he deploy far more troops to invade and occupy Iraq than what Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and prominent neo-conservatives were calling for.

Similarly, Bush was given a copy of Israeli politician and former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror” immediately after its publication in late 2004, and was so impressed by its argument for an aggressive pro-democracy policy in the Arab world that the White House asked the author to interrupt a book tour for a personal visit.

It is in this context Bush’s latest selections should be analysed. The first, “When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House”, concerns his favourite presidential antecedent, whose famous or infamous 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine shortly after the Spanish-American War heralded Washington’s claim to great-power status and its right to intervene unilaterally anywhere in the Americas against “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilised society”.

The second book on Bush’s reading list, “Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground” by Robert Kaplan is far more worrisome in its implications. Kaplan has evolved into a political thinker whose outlook is explicitly imperialist and reactionary.

In his view, the “war on terror” and associated conflicts is simply a repeat of the US Army’s Indian Wars. Instead of the Great Plains and western reaches of the 19th century US, 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. And who best to civilise these places and their inhabitants than the US military, specifically the “imperial grunts” with whom Kaplan embedded 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.

A US withdrawal from Iraq now, Kaplan has predicted, would result in a “real bloodbath” and a reversal of liberalisation in the Arab world, including the reconstitution of Lebanon by the Syrians “in their own totalitarian image”. He has also cautioned against China’s growing political and economic clout. — IPS