Response to Readership

Current Affairs

Do you actually believe the stuff that you write or do you come up with this outlandish bilgewater just to sell books? 

Well…If you survey the books I’ve written there are only a limited number of themes that seem pretty sensible and commonplace: e.g., there is a particular history and nature of the Western way of war, one that results in conventional lethality not otherwise explicable by the often small territory and population of the West (The Western Way of War; Carnage and Culture).

Democratic values, agrarianism, a sense of moral purpose and magnetic, often fiery misfit generals result in ferocious conscript armies (The Soul of Battle). Much of the history of Ancient Greece is understandable in agrarian rather than urban terms (The Other Greeks; Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greeks). War affects history in ways unlike other social and political events (Ripples of Battle), and in the case of our classical past deserves more careful study (Wars of the Ancient Greeks, Hoplites).

Classics provides an invaluable education, and if properly studied offers an antidote to the usual therapeutic university curriculum (Who Killed Homer?; Bonfire of the Humanities).

Since 9-11 we are in a war with Dark-Age enemies who have capitalized on the self-induced misery of the Middle East to promulgate a false sense of grievance against the West, one often enhanced by the sense of guilt and doubt so common in an affluent and leisured Europe and the Untied States (Autumn of War; Between War and Peace).

Agrarianism and the family farm (Fields without Dreams; The Land Was Everything) had cultural and social value for American society that transcended the efficient production of food and was beneficial to American society in ways that we do not often appreciate.

The melting pot, rather than multiculturalism, enforcement of national borders, and measured, legal immigration are all preferable to the present chaos (Mexifornia).

There are some 500 reviews published of these books in a variety of contexts, both scholarly and popular, and the reader can judge for himself whether they are outlandish or worse even.

I’m afraid I never wrote books to sell them—as the often narrow interest and dismal sales records of, to take a small example, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, The Land Was Everything, or The Other Greeks attest.

How does the theory that Iraq is becoming another Vietnam hold water in your eyes?

Hanson: Our enemies are fascists not communists; our military is professional not conscript; there are not nuclear patrons of the Islamicists threatening the US with missiles and defining the parameters of our military options; and so far our total casualties after a year comprise about 1/50 of the Vietnam War’s fatalities. The idea of leaving abruptly, of abandoning friends, of creating a sense of American weakness and unreliability—these are of more concern.

My question is about the lessons of Vietnam. In your book, 'Carnage and Culture' (now one of my favorites), you point out that millions died as a result of our withdrawal. You also point out the hypocrisy of the left in ignoring this point. It seems like we're now in the exact same situation as we were then, a tenuous military situation in Iraq and the radical left screeching to get out. How do we avoid the catastrophic mistake of Vietnam?

Hanson: We must hope that we are folk more like that of the Okinawa-generation than the Mogadishu public. If we take Fallujah, and alienate and end Sadr’s militia, then the reconstruction will be back on track—offering more of a moral boost than before the present turmoil. The entire struggle depends on whether the United States believes we are in a real war— or whether we think this is a criminal matter. Imagine May 1945 in the midst of trying to dislodge the Japanese from Sugar Loaf Hill: would we engage in national inquiry about who got us into the war with Japan? Or blame each other over Pearl Harbor? Become despondent from horrific footage of suicide bombers? Cease the assault and ask to parley with Japanese generals? Or begin a national debate about leaving the Pacific to avoid such seemingly senseless carnage?

Do you view the current events in Iraq as the modern equivalent of the Tet offensive?

Hanson: In the sense that what looks like an overwhelming American victory might soon be constructed as a political defeat, given media attention to losses and the lethality of American firepower? —well, yes, that has caused me sleepless nights and exasperation during the day. To paraphrase the little general: if one wishes to take Fallujah, then one takes Fallujah.

As we consider America's current efforts to bring order to Iraq and Afghanistan, are there insights that we can draw from America's post-war occupation of Japan that facilitated Japan's re-introduction into the world community as a productive and peaceful nation?

Hanson: Well, we are way ahead of the game if you look at the postbellum pace of elections and proposed national autonomy—or the relative degree of damage in Iraq versus Japan, whose major cities were almost all in ashes at war’s end. The difference? The Japanese knew that they were beaten, and that it was a terrible thing to fight the Americans, who were as unpredictable and dangerous as they were magnanimous and charitable. I am not sure we have established the former yet in the Sunni Triangle.

Niall Ferguson, in the Opinion Telegraph, claims that the current insurrections in Iraq are identical to those the British faced (1918-20) when they occupied the region and that we were naive to expect anything different. How do you respond to this claim?

With all due respect, the British were not pouring billions into the country or promising democratic autonomy or dealing with a society that had just been liberated from 30 years of reign by a mass murderer. The point? The resources at our disposal are far greater, and the magnitude of the problem equally more formidable. Are we naïve? I don’t think so at all. Defeating Iraq was always a difficult task. Those who predicted 5,000 dead and millions of refugees now feel vindicated; when in fact much of the current problem is explicable in the fact that the US military simply overran the country so rapidly and at so little cost, that many Baathists and fundamentalists themselves woke up and realized that they had been awed rather than militarily defeated. Despite the tragedy of the constant bombing and sniping, the very fact that an entire country has been liberated and is operating again in less than a year— at the rate of losses not unusual for a single week or two in Vietnam -- is unprecedented.

Is Iraq more or less bloody than similar U.S. conflicts in history?

Hanson: Far less bloody, if one compares World Wars I and II, Korea or Vietnam, or even insurrections in the Philippines. Our problem is that after Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Kosovo, Serbia, and Afghanistan, our military was so lethal that we assumed it would never again accept any losses. It creates an ever escalating sense of expectations that become almost impossible to meet—mirroring the nature of American society itself that feels 200 cable channel TV is passé or single-task cell phones are deserving of the junk pile.

I've heard a number of people complain that our endeavor in Iraq amounts to an exercise in misguided Wilsonian solipsism, a doomed attempt to plant democracy where it cannot grow. Could you comment?

Muslims participate in full and quasi- democracies in Turkey, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Almost all democratic efforts—Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Panama, Grenada, Serbia, and Afghanistan—followed from the use of force or the threat of such. I don’t like the word “plant” either—but I accept that, in fact, such coercion has often proven to have worked.

Did Clinton fail to prepare a program to deal with terrorism, Al Qaeda specifically, and provide the Bush team with this plan for implementation, which Bush ignored, in its entirety, thus needlessly causing the death of over 3,000 people? Was Rice unaware of Clinton strategy due to transition briefings, or did she choose to ignore or downplay it (originally she denied even having the meeting but I think the meeting minutes forced her to backtrack)?

Hanson: I’ve written about this at length. Aren’t we all bored by all the name-calling and conspiracy theory? I guess at this point I just try to simplify things: 8 years of the Clinton Administration gave us the various embassy bombings, Khobar Towers, the first World Trade Center, and the USS Cole; in contrast, within 26 days of September 11, 2001 we were attacking Afghanistan. That we liberated 50 million and ended the Taliban and Saddam Hussein at the cost of less than 600 combat dead is rather different than the past strategy—perhaps riskier in the short term, but ultimately the safer course. Remember heretofore the Patriot Act, “preemption, ” and “dead or alive” were all often repeated ad nauseam to caricature the Bush Administration as far too trigger-happy. So now is he to be blamed for preempting too quickly in Iraq or not preempting soon enough in Afghanistan?

When you see a headline like this from today's Washington Post, what do you think?
"U.S. Forces Take Heavy Losses As Violence Spreads Across Iraq: About a Dozen Marines Killed; Foreigners, Scores of Iraqis Die"