December 2005

Response to Readership

Is Herodotus more accessible than Thucydides?  Also, given your expressed feeling regarding Alexander, have you written anything regarding Hannibal?  Both fought wars as the aggressors (although the Carthaginians would have argued otherwise) and both were brilliant.  I wondered if your judgment falls as harshly on Hannibal as it does Alexander?

Hanson: For the Military History Quarterly, I once wrote an article on Hannibal and Cannae, and later discussed the Second Punic War in a chapter in Carnage and Culture. In the forthcoming Cambridge History of Classical Warfare, I review some of the literature about Roman republican warfare. No, I'm not as harsh on Hannibal, though no fan of his either since his view of commercial Carthaginian aristocracy was different — read worse — from Roman republicanism. I will grant that both were great tacticians, less so grand strategists, although Alexander understood better than Hannibal the nature of his enemy and the grand purposes of his battlefield masterpieces.

If the occupation of Iraq is so important, why do you support Rumsfeld? He did and is doing a terrible job.

Hanson: If you listen to the demonization of the press perhaps; but if you empirically examine carefully his tenure, then in fact Mr. Rumsfeld is doing a wonderful job, well aside from his valuable articulation of the nature of the enemy and of the war. Examine four accomplishments: (1) against bureaucratic inertia, he sponsored military transformation well before 9/11 to prepare our troops for just the sort of unconventional uses we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq; (2) he oversaw the removal of the Taliban in 7 weeks; (3) he directed the removal of Saddam Hussein in 3 weeks; (4) due in part to such aggressive deployment abroad we have not had another 9/11 here at home.

Your charge, then, rests with the some 1800 Americans lost after the statue of Saddam fell and the general sense that Iraqi democracy either costs too much or won't work. I disagree vehemently, but admit, as in every war, mistakes were made. Yet I'm not sure that the majority of them were made by the Department of Defense or can be attributed solely to Rumsfeld — or if they can be, that mistakes nullify points 1-4 of the plus ledger. If one examines the careers of prior notable defense secretaries such as Lincoln's Stanton, George Marshall's tenure under Truman, or Nixon's Melvin Laird, they were all severely and unfairly attacked during their war years, but in postbellum calm were eventually accorded the praise they deserved — and Rumsfeld will have served longer than any of them, and have overseen more numerous and diverse wars than any. So I pray for all our safety that he finishes out his second term.

I’m mystified by the sentence below. Surely you don't mean to imply that "white America" is somehow responsible for tribalism?

Unfortunately, abstract deference in white America to racial tribalism often serves as psychological cover for an unwillingness to live among, or send one's children to school with, the ‘other.’

Hanson: In a word, I meant this: I never understood why liberal white people went quiet when racial minorities began talking about “the Race” or other such tribal nonsense, or why they gave deference to racial extremists (e.g., the Al Sharptons of the world), when integration, assimilation, traditional education, and intermarriage were the proven anecdotes for past discrimination and segregation.

But I’ve sensed that while the elite class often opposes vouchers, praises multiculturalism, and defers to ethnic chauvinism, it often sends it kids to mostly white schools, lives in mostly white areas, and associates with mostly white people. Whether we look at Bill Clinton or Al Gore who praised racially diversity, but put their kids in exclusive prep schools, or shysters like Michael Moore who hired few blacks on his film production, or academics who are the forefront of the progressive cause, we don’t see much difference from their actual practice and those on the right whom they castigate.

Thus abstract sermonizing must serve as some sort of palliative for the Left to excuse its otherwise rather conservative behavior. Two decades in academia taught me that those who shouted the loudest on their soapboxes about diversity, embraced very little of it in their own lives, and mostly lived rather segregated lives in tasteful faculty enclaves, worried mostly about their children going to elite school and universities—precisely the opposite behavior one might have assumed from their castigations. They were the proverbial Orwellian pigs prancing on two feet inside the farmer’s dining room, justifying it all by the loud comrade slogans posted on the barn wall.

As for economic policies, both France and Germany are at least attempting to reform their welfare states, so although they may be completely unworkable, they’ll hopefully begin to converge with our system over the next several years.

In addition, I think anti-American sentiment prevalent there is at least in part caused by the less-than-adept diplomacy of the current administration; the majority of Americans are becoming fed up with it and the war in Iraq, even though cogent arguments could be made in its defense. Lastly, no matter how frustrated we become with Europe's schadenfreude over problems with the Katrina recovery or setbacks in Iraq, we need to recognize that allowing Western Europe, with its considerable financial and technological resources, to become part of a rival center, probably led by Russia, China, or both, is absolutely contrary to our national interests.

Hanson: Some of what you say about our natural ties, changes in Europe, and the need to stick together are well taken. But anti-Americanism predated George Bush and will postdate him as well, since it is a manifestation of deeper impulses that transcend diplomatic skill or lack thereof. Ask the Greeks what they thought of Secretary of State Albright or the German crowds what they thought of President Reagan.

Europe, as you say, has sizable resources and clout, and so it makes no sense to polarize Euros gratuitously. On the other hand, the more we smile, avoid slurs, and plan to go our separate ways, ironically the more they will begin to appreciate past American efforts. A good start would be to take the troops out of Germany, a country fast becoming the most anti-American of the central and western European states. Obviously when a single U.S. carrier group packs more conventional military power than the entire E.U. rapid deployment force, you’re going to have problems, with the weaker partner crying for multinational solutions, the stronger shrugging that it can handle things even if left alone. Go look at the great canvasses of French victories in the gallery at Versailles; eerily, the panorama of battlefield oils seems to start with Charles Martel and end about 1918, which should tell us something about postcolonial European confidence.

I was struck by the penultimate paragraph in your article "Heaven on Earth." Having recently read your excellent book on the Athenian-Spartan conflict, it reminded me of the Athenian situation: a relatively small citizenry able to engage in a variety of non-laborious pursuits, propped up by a mass of slaves and non-citizens. The Spartan situation, of course, was even more drastic with the helots. Is Europe just returning to its roots?

Hanson: Europe reminds me somewhat of Sparta, too — perfect equality for a limited, shrinking number inside the circle of peers, gradations of exploitation for the workers outside. I don’t know what Europe is doing, but whatever it is, we should avoid it like the plague, unless we too wish to become depopulated, static, utopian, angry, bitter, and stalling to a halt.

As you know, I have advocated a polite separation for a while, a gradual pulling out of all U.S. forces from Western Europe, and a de facto recognition that NATO is moribund. I say that with real reluctance since two wars there killed millions and thousands of our own and our presence has had positive effects.

But I don’t know any other way to end the pathological parent/teenager co-dependency, where defense subsidies only engender spite and hurt feelings on both sides. It’s time for Europe to move out of the house, and get its own life, and we should wish it well. For some time, it has not been an ally. We hope it remains a neutral, but if you read the papers over there, they sound more like enemies all the time, whose new secular religion is anti-Americanism. In short, by encouraging European military independence and autonomy, I think we can have a partner rather than a snarly subordinate, tension that is in no one’s interest. All so sad — and predating the demonizing of George Bush.

I see the riots in France as a part of a long and continuing war between the Arab world and the West. The riots are the consequence of perceived European weakness coupled with actual European decline. The Ottomans tried for centuries in the east and failed to crack Europe. Given our enemies’ proclivity to view everything historically, is this their next battle, a Western one? In other words, should we see the "riots" as some reflection of modern French apartheid, or as one more battle in a millennium-long war?

Hanson: No one quite knows the proper calculus that lies behind the riots: postcolonial angst, high unemployment, French racism, radical jihadism, sexual apartheid, etc. But I am open to being persuaded that this is the first round of a more radical Islamicist threat to follow in Europe. I think more likely, however, the imams and radicals in Europe, take the long view: current European appeasement for them is a sign that they are winning; and demography will do for them what guns cannot. That is, over the next 30 years as Europeans dwindle and more and more Middle Easterners take on the role of working for them, at some point a tipping point will be reached where there are so many Muslims that Europe will be de facto neutralized as a Western power. And because Europeans are not so much Christian or even Western in their professed identity anymore (they prefer to be known as secular citizens of the world), someone who believes in Islam, and is galvanized by it, may have far more influence than is explicable by mere numbers.

So the million-dollar question remains: will the Europeans, in the 11th hour, wake up, review immigration, clamp down on Islamic fascism, give up the salad bowl and embrace the melting pot, open their economy, get over their Pavlovian anti-Americanism, and once again become the confident beacon of Western civilization — or will they simply slouch into indifference and irrelevance?

I don't understand what you meant when you wrote "tribal" Mexico in a recent piece. Can you explain? Democracy is not only an American value. This great country could learn a few lessons from the Mexican voting system, one of the best in the world today, to make sure every vote counts and the president is truly elected by the majority.

Hanson: No, sadly, I think we could learn very little from the Mexican voting system that until very recently was rigged and corrupt and the president essentially pre-chosen.

“Tribal” means affinity to business cliques or family members or ethnic groups over allegiance to a government. I used the term in the broad sense that a few family consortia exercise undue influence in Mexico; drug cartels do the same, and so do local police forces — all of which demand tribal rather than national loyalty from their membership. If the national government could enforce radical reform, ensure the rule of law, open its economy, and foster a middle class, then the present glaring anomaly in Mexico would end: one of the world’s richest natural landscapes is beset with such abject poverty that its failed government survives in part on the principle of exporting 1 million of its citizens per year in hopes of alleviating social tension and winning billions in remittances in the bargain. It is a real tragedy, although one so shrouded in political correctness and ethnic tensions and pride that we dare not discuss Mexico’s dilemma.

Regarding your recent, disingenuous, suck-up piece: When did you convert to political correctness? You cannot honestly equate Palestinian with al Qaeda terrorists — however horrible both are — and I think you know it.

Hanson: I don’t really know what your incoherent letter is about, except the last silly part. Given that al Qaeda and many Palestinian terrorists (1) use the same methods of suicide bombings; (2) both call for rule by Islamic fundamentalism (cf. Hamas and Islamic Jihad); and (3) both hate the West, of course I can equate them — or do you think bombings recently in northern Egypt against Israelis were done by phantoms? I recall Palestinian cheering on the West Bank on news of 9/11 and the canonization of bin Laden, so yes, there is a lot of what I would call “equation.”

By including Russia in your list of victims of Islamic fundamentalism, you are in error. The recent attacks in Nalchik by Muslim-Russian citizens were a rebellion against an unjust oppression, and targeted the agencies of that oppression, not the civilian population. It was by no means an expression of extremist Islam. If you chose to research the matter, you’d find that your essay is incorrect in this regard. Further, you’ve provided moral support to the Russian president in his policy of barbarous repression of the peoples of the Caucasus.

Hanson: With all due respect, I did research “the matter.” Saying that the recent attacks had an Islamic radical element is hardly to condone the Russian response or the brutal past history of the region, any more than to note the French rioters were Muslim by and large, and Islam had a role besides high French unemployment and racism. But you are naïve to even suggest that the so-called resistance in Chechnya is liberal in nature — cf. some Islamicists from the Caucasus who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, apparently on the principle of universal jihad.

I completely agree with your comparison of Islamic extremism to a global virus and your condemnation of the timidity of our response to this threat. However, you didn’t mention the rioting of angry Muslim youths in Paris and the half-hearted French response. Do you think that this insurrection of sorts is related to the spread of radical Islam, or do you consider it a local affair with primarily economic or racial motivations?

Hanson: The same week my “Real Global Virus” essay was published, I devoted my entire syndicated newspaper column for Tribune Media Services to the French riots. There I cited Islamic radicalism, pathetic French job growth, post-colonial angst, and French apartheid. But it is no local affair — as we have seen in London, Madrid, and Amsterdam.

In fact, the most interesting question of our time is Europe’s response to the enemies in its midst. Will it galvanize to save the liberal traditions of the West, and give an ultimatum to its Muslim discontents to abide by European values or leave—or will it cave and mask its cravenness with the usual utopian multicultural rhetoric? I must confess that I really don’t know the answer, since I meet Europeans all the time who are bold, full of integrity, and ready to defend Western culture — and in disagreement with their own E.U. elites. So let’s watch carefully, and hope Muslims in Europe have the character and wisdom to embrace the culture they apparently chose and do not wish to leave — and to disassociate themselves from the culture that under no circumstances they wish to return to across the Mediterranean.

I am a mother who has home-schooled her youngest daughter and who is now teaching a course on the Greeks and Romans to middle to high school age students. I’m using your books on the Greeks. Very soon we will move on to the Romans. Have you written about them as well? Is there anyone out there who has, and whose approach is similar to your own? I would appreciate it if you could give me a little guidance.

Hanson: Books for pre-college students? Try the series authored by Don Nardo, about 10 volumes or so now. Colin Wells wrote a brief readable history of Rome. Why not have them start with the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Ancient World, which is accessible and excellent? And if they are not too young to start right in with primary sources, try a selection of Roman historians (there are many such editions), emphasizing passages from Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Ammianus.

What are your thoughts about a two-phase Iraq invasion in which we would have invaded the Shiite areas in March 2003, used the next two years to build a Shiite army capable of fighting alongside U.S. troops, and invaded the Sunni areas in 2005? Would 100,000 Shiites fighting alongside our troops have prevented much of the chaos and insurgency? Would there have been fewer U.S. casualties? Would Turkey have let us invade Kurdish areas in 2003 if we made it clear that we weren't going on to Baghdad immediately?

Hanson: I don’t know the answers to your what-if questions in this era of popular second-guessing. But almost alone in this country, apparently, I think that the American achievement in creating a democratic mechanism in Iraq within three years was historic and came at costs far lower than pessimists had originally predicted would be required for taking out Saddam. At some distant future day, if we keep our nerve and withstand the Sheehans, Moores, and Boxers, it will be said of the U.S. that this was our finest hour, when we destroyed fascism in Afghanistan and Iraq and gave the entire region a chance for freedom and democracy, without demanding its oil, riches, or alliance. But I have no hope anymore that many can see that right now, in these, the worst and best of times.

You wrote:

And when the jihadists identify for us, as they do repeatedly, the religious beliefs and doctrines that inspire their actions and that are consistent with the history and theology of their religion, we arrogantly dismiss their words as expressions of some neurosis or delusion whose true sources lie elsewhere.

Is it really Islam, or Islam married to Marxist and post-colonial theory? I have in mind one of bin Laden's diatribes which called the crusades an injury, and a war Muslims won. But that injury is consistent with the ahistorical politics and theories of the European (and far too many of the American) academy.

Many of the jihadist leaders, we discover, have been educated abroad, in the worst cesspits of this pseudo-intellectualism. Is this a coincidence? Don't many of the jihadists remind you of nothing so much as the Communist revolutionaries of Cuba, South American, and Indochina? In other words, could Islam be polluted by a Western (Marx, Edward Said) heresy? And isn't that a point it might be useful for the Iraqis and the U.S. to make?

Hanson: Your lengthy point was well worth reading. Hamas, al Qaeda, Hezbollah — are all groups populated by parasites emboldened by anti-Western rhetoric emanating from the West, and filled with a sense of failure in being attracted to Western imports that they cannot recreate or even repair when they break it. I agree with your broader point that the West no longer defends itself, and then is suddenly surprised when its enemies take its elites’ words to heart and do what Westerners have advocated in word. But for 2,500 years, Westerners have walked a thin line — our economic bounty and unbridled freedom have created as a byproduct a corrupt cynicism embraced by elites too well off to give up their perks, yet too embarrassed over them to defend the system that enriched them. So they take a Chomsky/Michael Moore cheap course of trash-talking while living high. Depressing and dangerous, of course; but nothing new: it’s all in the banquet scene of Petronius’s Satyricon.

Charles Adams argues that high taxes are dangerous for civilization. He feels the higher taxes (tributes) on non-Athenians caused the Peloponnesian war in the first place — a question of fairness. He felt that low tax on Athens produced the good that came out of it, and argued that the loss of resources was due to the loss of empire because the war/tax rebellion was why Athens was too weak after the war to save itself. He did not comment on the rebirth you speak of.

Hanson: In general, high taxes resulting in the destruction of a middle class (the Greek ideal of the "mesoi") is the usual bane of civilization, and leads to depopulation, an embittered elite, and a subsidized and unproductive poor. I don’t think, however, Athenian behavior per se caused the war. Sparta hated radical imperial democracy because of its success, and its antithesis to values like oligarchy, parochialism, and landed conservatism, and so it preempted and invaded in spring 431 B.C. Remember that it was not just Athens which was too weak to save itself, if by that you mean “save itself” from Macedon. The winners of the war, Sparta and Thebes, were also unable to save the polis, partly because they engaged in 30 years of internecine war against each other. But in general, Philip found a disheartened city-state whose ossified traditions were not able to incorporate new citizens, come up with an idea similar to the Romans’ natio, or redefine Hellenism as an inclusive idea rather than one relevant only to a particular people in a particular place with a particular language.

If another 9/11-type attack happens here in the U.S., do you think that we’ve prepared a response? Have we notified our enemies, most notably Iran and Syria, of the consequences for such an attack? What might our response look like?

I discussed this at length and to much criticism in a controversial NRO article entitled “Another 9/11?” which argued that we need to inform Iran and Syria (and perhaps others as well)—right now—that we know the next 9/11 is impossible without the stealthy help of rogue regimes who fund and house terrorists. Thus we will quite clumsily hold them responsible as if they themselves planned the attack — in hopes that the warning would achieve deterrence and force both Tehran and Damascus to rein in their surrogates. I don’t think that in such an Armageddon scenario the American people would lose part of New York or Washington while allowing Tehran and Damascus, the godheads of anti-American terrorists, to escape our fury. Such things are better discussed by diplomats than bandied about in the press; our role as opinion writers, however, is to ensure they are at least discussed and our enemies quietly warned of the circumstances.

In light of the Iranian president’s recent comments that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth, do you think that Israel will allow the continued development of nuclear technology or do you think it will attack Iran's facilities? What will be the likely U.S. role in this, and should it happen? If Iran continues this program unchecked, what are the long-term prospects for the survival of the Jewish state?

Hanson: One thing is for certain: Iran will not get nuclear weapons. Any statesman who allows this to happen on his or her watch will be forever discredited. If a theocratic Iran got the bomb, it would only be a matter of time before it sought paradise by trying to end Israel. So no, as I wrote once, there will be no second Holocaust, and the Iranians will not finish what their godhead Hitler started. We are watching the doomsday clock tick: as the Iranians fume and rant, they unknowingly inch closer to a showdown that they will, in fact, lose. Europe has surrendered, viewing Iran as no worse than a nuclear Pakistan. Russia and China derive a certain sick pleasure in seeing us with another nuclear enemy that they believe will never threaten them. The U.N. is, well, the U.N. — as worthless in practice as it is impressive in its rhetoric. The defense of the West as it involves Iran lies in the hands of Israel and the United States alone.

What’s your response to the claim that we aren’t on course to achieving democracy in Iraq, and that the incorporation of Islam into Iraq’s constitution and government will only encourage the problems of jihad and radical Islam that you argue we must fight?

Hanson: Well, it’s not going to look like Carmel, that’s for sure. Turkey would be about as good as we can expect — and the Europeans apparently want nothing even of that. But consider it this way: we have set a fire of freedom in the Middle East, and they can sort it out as liberal reformers, enthralled by this new experiment, come out the woodwork. Cynics might say we have used Iraqis to fight our enemies, the Islamists — true, but odd that the Left here at home doesn’t see that as well. (Whoever thought that Iraqis under Saddam who raped Kuwait and practiced genocide against the Kurds and Iranians would now fight on the frontlines against al Qaeda?)