An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

220 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States mili­

tary had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready

to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's

notice.

The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands­

similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American

West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the

U.S. Army .... [A]ccording to the soldiers and marines I met

on the ground in far-flung corners of the earth, the compari­

son with the nineteenth century was ... apt. "Welcome to

lnjun Country" was the refrain I heard from troops from Co­

lombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To

be sure, the problem for the American military was less [Is­

lamic] fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism

was really about taming the frontier. 4

Kaplan goes on to ridicule "elites in New York and Washington"

who debate imperialism in "grand, historical terms," while indi­

viduals from all the armed services interpret policy according to the

particular circumstances they face and are indifferent to or unaware

of the fact that they are part of an imperialist project. This book

shows how colonialism and imperialism work.

Kaplan challenges the concept of manifest destiny, arguing that

"it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire

in the western part of the continent." Rather, he argues, western

empire was brought about by "small groups of frontiersmen, sepa­

rated from each other by great distances." Here Kaplan refers to

what Grenier calls settler "rangers," destroying Indigenous towns

and fields and fo od supplies. Although Kaplan downplays the role of

the US Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to

the modern Special Forces, he acknowledges that the regular army

provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering

the buffalo, the food supply of Plains peoples, as well as making

continuous raids on settlements to kill or confine the families of the

Indigenous fighters.5 Kaplan summarizes the genealogy of US mili­

tarism today: