"i don't like the sound of those drums"

``Welcome to Injun Country'' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.

So Robert Kaplan says in his Imperial Grunts. But one whopping historical analogy is not enough: not only is the War on Terror like the Indian Wars, both of them, Kaplan has it, resemble the work of the British Raj in the nineteenth century.

In the current New York Review of Books, John Gray writes, with characteristic snappiness,

The suggestion that there is an analogy between the American Indian wars and the global role of the United States today is striking, and so is the comparison between those wars and the construction of the British Raj. In each case the resemblance is tenuous or nonexistent.

Which is perfectly fair. The Raj was, after all, a reasonably long-term colonial proposition with an extensive civil service and a supporting ideal of imperialism. The Indian Wars were, more or less, a military expression of ``get out of my way''. The War on Terror is neither: despite Niall Ferguson's urgings, an intelligent, thought-out American imperialism has not emerged nor, I bet, will it. And, as Gray points out, we had better hope the War on Terror doesn't start to look like the Indian Wars; to hope so is, as he writes, ``repugnant and absurd''.

But right as Gray is about these points, there are certain discomfiting lessons of the Indian Wars that might well apply today.

First is the question of whether the army is big enough for the job. In 1865, the United States had an enormous, experienced army of which other major nations were rightly envious and fearful. Looking forward at the job ahead of them, you might have thought, it's a good thing, too. They've got to occupy the seceded states and restore civil authority. They've got to occupy the western territories and create civil authority. A million hardened soldiers in an established military hierarchy -- even half a million hardened soldiers -- might be a good thing to have for such projects.

Except, of course, Congress shrank the army to a tiny fraction of its wartime self. By the late 1860s, the U.S. Army in its entirety was maybe half the size of the raiding party Sherman had led through Georgia.

With a larger army, Reconstruction might have gone better: more troops might have kept the Klan and its ilk in check. Western settlement might have gone more smoothly too: along with a carefully planned and built set of railroad supply lines, a larger army might have made the West less wild.

But nobody much wanted the U.S. to have a big, European-style army. It was costly and frankly un-American. As it was, the soldiers and their gory chores were well away from most Americans' thoughts, and only the worst mishaps made the headlines.

Which leads to the second question, of whether the U.S. Army can do the job of a colonial force without a colonial policy, or a philosophy of colonialism, to back it. There was no imperial plan, really, for the West. American leadership tended to assume that once stifling tribal leadership and customs were got rid of, the Indians would happily begin living like other U.S. citizens. This sanguine expection turned out to correspond poorly with sanguinary reality.

Possibly the Indian Wars, which lasted a quarter-century after the Civil War, would have been shorter and less bloody had the territorial projects looked a bit more like the Raj, with a little more institutional and ideological support. If they succeeded well enough it was because, as Gray points out, the American settlers rolling across the plains were inexorably displacing the Indians and their ways.

When the U.S. tried to repeat the project of empire-without-imperialism in the Philippines, it had less luck. There were no Conestogas heading to settle the archipelago. The still-tiny, underfunded army ended fighting its savage war of peace without either a clear imperial mission or a plausible theory of territorial assimilation.

So possibly today we can, after all, draw lessons from the disjunctions between expectation and reality in these earlier American empires-without-imperialism. Just not, maybe, the lessons Kaplan wants to draw.