February 2006

Response to Readership

Explain to what extent the different social classes in ancient Greece and Rome typically believed in the Olympian gods.

Hanson: Somewhere around 450 B.C. in Athens a number of the elite stopped seeing the Olympians as real deities but as, at best, valuable institutions that helped enforce some sort of moral constraint on the less well educated. The rise of Orphism, Pythagoreanism, followed by neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism were all efforts either to decry the old polytheism, substitute reason for superstition, themselves patently atheistic, or attempts to see a monotheistic moral superior being.

The same was true of Rome by the second century B.C. And yet like us a number of astute learned observers from Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato realized the dangers of explaining phenomena solely according to pure reason, or at least they recognized the need for some sort of transcendent moral authority to maintain the thin veneer of civilization. At all times, there was probably a vast difference in religious belief among the various classes, the agrarian and middle/poor strata much more invested in polytheism, the urban educated more open to a menu of various religious and philosophical beliefs, including imported exotic cults from the east.

How advanced is Pakistan's nuclear weapons program?  Is an Osirak-style attack to remove the Islamic bomb, perhaps coordinated with regional democracies in India and Israel, not worthy of consideration before Pakistan's Musharraf is overthrown or before Pakistan's technology is spread?

Hanson: I think that horse has left the barn long ago and the Pakistanis probably have between 50-100 bombs. As Bill Clinton and Al Gore traipse the globe apologizing for U.S. crimes by this and other administrations, perhaps they should first mention that Pakistan became nuclear on their watch. Right now, all that saves the West is the heartbeat of a pro-Western dictator and the nuclear deterrence of India, without which Pakistan would have a free Islamic hand to provide nuclear deterrence for all sorts of fascistic cliques. Indeed, the United States and India must grow even closer, tied as they are by democracy, English, mutual fears of jihadism and nuclear rogues, and millions of immigrants in the U.S.

What do you believe will happen should Iran actually develop a nuclear weapon? Will it:

1) Announce to the world to insulate itself from the West's attempts to foment regime change.
2) Attempt to hide the fact to keep us guessing.
Or
3) Follow through on Ahmadinejad's threats by "testing" its first nuke on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Hanson: All three — and more — are possibilities for any leader who thinks his magnetism stops people from blinking. At first, a nuclear Iran will tread carefully, but as it soon takes the full measure of the world's appeasement, it will begin to bully neighbors, threaten Europe, and show off about its plans against Israel. Unlike Pakistan, there is no India nearby to provide deterrence.

The problem is not just the point when it gets its first bomb, but rather when it continues to get 40-50 additional ones and gains a capability beyond just threatening Israel. Then it will have the power of taking out a number of countries that will either have to bow and stoop or face perennial nuclear blackmail. The great debate now centers upon the question whether taking out the arsenal before completion will only energize the mullahs and destroy the dissident population, or, on the contrary, humiliating the regime and empowering opponents in the fashion of the Falklands defeat and the subsequent loss of face of the Argentine generals.

One needs genius and luck to navigate simultaneously through the Iraq war, the Hamas victory, the Iran bomb acquisition, and the help given al Qaeda by Arab regimes.

I agree with several ideas in your recent article, "The Moral War." However, I greatly question your listing Bob Woodward as an example of the "sorry state of journalistic ethics and incompetence." To me, Woodward has consistently represented very professional, if not stylistically flawless, journalism. How would you qualify your claim?

Hanson: Well, first by Woodward's dubious assertions such as the purported death-bed confession of William Casey that "I believed" — heard only by Woodward who apparently was conducting some sort of interview with a man suffering from a massive malignant brain tumor?

Or compare his most recent belated revelation that he had known about the Plame matter far earlier than believed and yet kept silent. And then there are two other disturbing traits: the notion of access journalism in which, given Woodward's ability to sell thousands of books, sources are more or less confronted with a choice: 'either talk to me off the record and get out your side of the story, or I will write only what others say about you.'

I was curious, sir, about your thoughts on "civil disobedience," as put forth by Henry David Thoreau. I read Who Killed Homer? and gleaned some of your thoughts about Antigone, but I remain hungry for any other thoughts you might impart.

Hanson: Well, Antigone, a literary figure, is not all that different from Socrates, the historical philosopher: both follow a higher law. Antigone buries her brother against Creon's edicts; Socrates at various times resisted after Arginusai in illegally bringing the generals to court en masse, apparently objected to the Sicilian expedition, and followed the enlightenment — branded as sophistic blasphemy for its creed that natural phenomena are to be judged empirically and according to reason, rather than through religious superstition alone. But note that neither resorted to violence nor sought to avoid the state's punishment for the breaking of a stupid law. (Cf. the discussion in Plato's Crito, the locus classicus about civil disobedience.). The 5th-century notion of civil disobedience seems to be based on shaming and suffering, or the idea that one courts confrontation, then suffers the penalty from an unjust state, and in the process illustrates how wrong such laws are — often dying in the process. I suppose the nonviolent stances for Americans from Thoreau to Martin Luther King were quite similar.

In A War Like No Other, I was bothered by your discussion of the difficulty in destroying olive trees. An old timer's method, still used around here for killing trees is to "girdle" them.  Though commonly done these days with a chain saw, it is also easy to do with an ax or hatchet. When done with a hatchet it is sometimes called "frilling".  Essentially, one just takes a series of strokes toward the ground around the circumference of the tree to remove a collar of the outer and inner bark. The bark doesn't have to be completely removed — it can be left hanging. The cuts only need to be deep enough to go through the cambium of the tree, so it is quite quick to do. The big advantage of girdling is that the tree dies over the next season by causing the roots, no longer able to get food from the sap, to die. As a consequence there are no sprouts after death. Do the original Greek sources that describe destroying the olive trees include a simple method like girdling?

Hanson: I discussed girdling in Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece in some detail. There is only one passage I know of wartime girdling, a metaphorical allusion in Aristophanes to stripping the bark.  As I wrote, girdling is a much faster method of damage, but the case of the olive is not the same as citrus or most other deciduous fruit trees, since the cuts must be much deeper and the olive almost immediately sends up lush growth beneath the girdling, as I can attest from personal experience.

Moreover, as I also wrote in a chapter on the philology of devastation, the usual words for attacking olive trees translate as "tree-burning" or "tree-chopping" or "cutting down" or "burning up "rather than "cutting around." My hunch is that girdling was used often, but in the case of the olive had little permanent effect other than ruining a year's harvest or damaging the tree for the next season.

In a recent "Reader Response", you cited the rhetoric of Lincoln and Pericles. I recently introduced my children to Willard R. Espy's version (1983) of Henry Peacham's Garden of Eloquence (1593) — and was struck, again, by the inability of our politicians to make effective use of the tools of rhetoric. Is there anyone around today who comes close to matching the Classical standard? Or was Churchill the last?

Hanson: Given his singularity, Churchill is an unfair comparison, but he was, in truth, superhuman in his oratory and prose, and we will not see his like ever again, a true genius. JFK was gifted and drew gifted writers to him. Reagan had a flair and, at times, so does Tony Blair. The tragedy is that in our electronic age, politicians fail to grasp that the human soul remains unchanged, and so yearns to be inspired by moving prose and speech in a way that is impossible through photo-ops and sound bites. Few realize that classical prose was musical, and its antitheses, qualifiers, binaries, and tricola were all means of hitting a note as well as conveying meaning. The present-day staccato style of short punchy sentence fragments and vocabulary repeated ad nauseam may serve as good talking points, but they are forgotten with the next day's news cycle. In contrast, the music of Pericles and Churchill lives on and always will.

You have alluded in the past to your “conservative Democrat” identity.  Please describe what a Conservative Democratic agenda would espouse economically, domestically, and in terms of defense and foreign policy.

Hanson: Good question. Let's imagine.

1. Economically: an end to subsidies to large corporate concerns. No more money for corporate agriculture, which compromises competition and goes to those hardly in need. Some sort of taxation that is either flat or nearly so, and eliminates evasion through phony write-offs. A balanced budget and an end to borrowing for programs we cannot afford, both subsidies for left-wing failed programs and right-wing conglomerates. Some sort of energy policy that weans us off imported petroleum by a balance between conservation, energy exploration, nuclear power, methanol and ethanol, and coal.

2. Domestically: protection of the border and an end to illegal immigration, both to promote the melting pot and to end the undermining of lower-end wages for Americans by the massive influx of illegal alien labor. Less advocacy for radical abortion, homosexual marriage, radical environmentalism and a host of cultural issues that special interests insist upon, but are not embraced by the majority of Americans. No more ethnic separatism but a return to the melting pot and an end to identity politics. More attention to the Midwest and less to Hollywood and the upper-West Side, since populism as advanced by boutique millionaires is a hard sell.

3. Defense and foreign policy: an end to Gorism, in which a Jimmy Carter or Al Gore travel the globe to apologize for American policies to their autocratic hosts. Something akin to Harry Truman or JFK is needed, in which Democratic foreign policy seeks to forge a bipartisan consensus with Republicans, jettisons the Vietnam War era trash-the-United-States mindset, and appreciates that millions come here for a reason. I wouldn't let a Moveon.org mouthpiece, Cindy Sheehan, George Soros, or Hollywood actor speak for any Democrat.

I confess I just don't feel a John Kerry (who thinks American soldiers are terrorizers), or Al Gore (who tells the dictatorial Saudis that the U.S. hurts Arabs), or a Howard Dean (who believes the war is unwinnable and George Bush may have had advance knowledge of 9/11) or Ted Kennedy (who charges that we were no different from Saddam at Abu Ghraib) or Dick Durban (who said we were Nazi-like at Guantanamo) in a post-9/11 world can be trusted with the nation's security.

Here two facts are cognizant: 1) the American people agree since they have not elected a Democratic President without a southern accent (an apparent symptom of conservatism) in nearly a half-century and only then under extraordinary circumstances (a preceding assassination, Watergate, or the presence of a third-party conservative like Ross Perot); and; 2) the foreign policies of both Jimmy Carter (the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage-taking, the Sandinista take-over, the Cambodian holocaust, the Soviet adventurism and Olympic boycott, the erosion in U.S. military preparedness, etc.) and Bill Clinton (global apologies, Pakistani nuclearization with similar programs hatched in Iran and North Korea, and, of course, the precursors of September 11, from the relatively unanswered first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the East African embassies, the USS Cole, etc.) were mostly disasters. Note too how similar the Democratic left has become to the isolationist policies of the Buchanan Right; read The Nation and The American Conservative: they are almost identical now.

In Who Killed Homer? you point out moral opposition to war by the Greeks. How different is the opposition of a Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore from that of Herodotus or Euripides?

Hanson: When Herodotus writes that war is terrible because fathers bury sons, rather than sons fathers, or when Euripides portrays the anguish of the captured Trojan women (probably in response to the 416 B.C. butchery at Melos), they both evoke human tragedy, not stilted melodrama.

Second, read what Herodotus wrote about the Persians who invaded Greece, or Euripides' portrait of the Spartans: both authors, rightly or wrongly, clearly empathize with democracy over the Persians or the oligarchic Spartans, who are unfavorably portrayed in most Euripidean dramas. In contrast, with a Moore or Chomsky it is unclear whom they wish to win, especially when Moore heralds as "Minutemen" those who blow up Americans trying to foster democracy.

And ancient authors had a commitment to the truth as they saw it; in contrast, almost everything Chomsky wrote, say, about Afghanistan was demonstrably untrue; while Moore's docu-fantasies are simply stitched-together propaganda. The point of all this is that one can in good faith oppose the American effort in the Middle East, as an American without empathizing with the enemy or undermining American soldiers who are fighting a war ordered by their elected President and ratified by a majority vote of Congress.

There is more honesty in a single chorus of Euripides than in all Moore’s films combined, more truth in one book of the story-teller Herodotus than in all the conspiracy theories of the 'scholar' Chomsky. And then there is the aesthetic consideration: Chomsky is a bore, his "by good authority" and "as I have proven elsewhere before" clichés, like Michael Moore's cut-and-paste interviews, are in the end ugly and cacophonous, both harsh to the ear and eye.

I read an op-ed piece of yours in the Chicago Tribune regarding Palestinian activities in the Gaza Strip. Your comments reflect a patronizing and ethnocentric view of another culture that is really galling — discussing the blather about democracy. The U.S. can't even run its own government properly, which is why the media — the lapdogs of the government and corporations — fills page after page with criticism of other countries. You sound like someone writing from an 18^th- or 19^th-century perspective when people had the excuse of ignorance for their entitled white perspective, but in the 21st century it is sickening.

Hanson: Nothing like a sober and judicious question that employs terms like "galling" and "sickening" in lieu of an argument. Let me answer you by asking a simple question about "another culture". Would most citizens of the world prefer to live in Gaza — or Arizona or even New York? And why exactly would they prefer the U.S.? That answer has nothing to do with race, despite your attempts to inject such smears, but everything to do with culture.

If the Palestinians craft a democracy, create a middle class, insist on the rule of law and property rights, embrace religious tolerance, and adopt capitalism, freedom of the press, and an independent judiciary, then Gaza, situated as it is in a key location, enjoying a beautiful seafront, and the beneficiary of ideal weather, could indeed become an oasis. But until then, it will probably be a self-induced nightmare; and for all your own multi-cultural platitudes, you yourself would hardly wish to live or visit there, and would much prefer the United States whose government and media you so conveniently trash

The problem with our own mainstream media is not, pace your allegations, that it "fills page after page with criticism of other countries," but that its elite journalists harp mostly on perceived wrongs of the United States, to such a degree that the half-educated such as yourself seem to think an unbiased critique of Gaza is "ethnocentric" or "patronizing" rather than empirical. No, sir, your views, while not sickening, are at least tragically misguided to the point of becoming pathetic.

Are we seeing a return, perhaps, to the McKinley era? What are the indicators, you might ask? There is an ever-increasing gap in wealth with a shrinking percentage of the population in the top and the middle class, combined with a total disinterest in the economic conditions of the people at the bottom. And then we have this "crusade" to democratize the Middle East which parallels the "white man's burden" to civilize those benighted “brown people” of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of the U.S. defeat of a small, impoverished nation via the Spanish-American War.

Hanson: I don't think so for a variety of reasons, though I share your worries about the vulnerability of the middle class, and the enormous power of wealth at the very top of our society in the hands of a Bill Gates, George Soros, or Ted Turner. What is strange is how the hyper-wealthy, who have found ways to beat the system, so often advocate policies that reflect their own insularity from the ordeal of making a living — whether the statism of a Teresa Kerry or the crackpot grant-giving from institutions such as the Rockefeller or Ford foundations.

But first, remember that being poor now is hardly the same as in 1898. Technology and the inclusion of 2 billion Chinese and Indians into the global market have redefined poverty as something of cultural deprivation rather than material want. Visit Wal-Mart or Taco Bell and you can see that goods and food are available in surfeit to almost all Americans, whose average square footage of housing, televisions, cars, and other indicators are at all time highs in terms of accessibility. Obesity, not starvation, is the new bane of the impoverished. Most gang members who are active about 2 miles from my farm wear clothes whose net cost of acquisition is several times that of my own wardrobe, and their cars are as nice or better than my own. Credit is available to almost anyone. The local emergency room and car dealership or state-subsidized apartment complexes belie the notion that here in one of the poorest regions of California the poor are without medical care, transportation, or housing.

Nor do I think the democratization effort has anything to do with race as you insinuate, but rather is intended to bring stability to the Middle East in lieu of another 9/11, when the absence of an alternative to either fundamentalism or autocracy resulted in murderous Muslim youths slamming our jets into our own skyscrapers. Iraq was neither small nor impoverished, and it was not annexed. The United States has not taken anyone's land since the Spanish-American war, and usually gives back ground that it once won at great cost, whether Okinawa or central Europe. Giving Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan, and Egypt billions is hardly a crusade — foolhardy perhaps, but mostly out of naiveté than any more due to realpolitik.

Why not support democracy in the Sudan?  Why not support democracy in Uzbekistan? Why not support democracy in China? They just might greet us as liberators! Sadly, you like many other conservative columnists seem to have abandoned conservatism for liberal Republicanism because you see no other choice under the current leadership. Democracy (in Iraq and elsewhere) cannot be bestowed upon any group of people by some higher power.  It has to grow from the ground up.  Is that so hard to understand?

Hanson: Well, Italy, Germany, Japan, Panama, the Balkans and Afghanistan all seem to have had democracy "imposed" by the outside. Ditto the British in India. I think rudimentary study of ancient Athens would suggest the Athenian city-state spread democracy often, for good or evil, as a "higher power."

I think, in fact, we are trying to support democracy in Sudan, China, or Uzbekistan, and finding that almost no other power even tries. You seem to think the war in Iraq is the blueprint for all our efforts, forgetting Lebanon, pressures on the Gulf States, or Egypt, where the use of U.S. force was not a current option. I don't know what "liberal Republicanism" is being a conservative Democrat who abhors the present deficits, agricultural subsidies, open borders, oil-dependency on the Middle East, and entitlement spending that reached record levels of increases the past four years.

Supplying weapons against the Russians in Afghanistan and leaving gave us the Taliban and al Qaeda; abandoning Lebanon in 1983 gave us 20 years of Hezbollah attacks, and not going to Baghdad bequeathed 12 years of no-fly zones and an angry Saddam. Usually wars offer only bad and worse choices, and post-September 11, we chose to stay engaged and build something rather than just launching cruise-missiles and leaving.

If Democrats pick up House seats and infect a larger percentage of the American population with their utopian nonsense, an all-volunteer army may decline in the future.  Worse yet, recruiters are not allowed even on most Ivy League campuses, the world's repository of utopian ineptness and failed "isms", where ideas appeal to a weaker and weaker product of the current American educational system. More than the problem with the ailing Left, the battle over our declining education is not being fought, and it needs to be for us to survive.

Hanson: I think, in fact, we are fighting over education, and trying to address politicized research, suppression of free speech and debate on campus, and admission policies that are not transparent, along with old issues of an ossified tenure system and political litmus tests de facto required in hiring. So far we have been saved by the intrinsically rebellious nature of youth to authority. The Baby Boomer pigs who threw out Farmer Jones and took over the farmhouse now walk on two-legs themselves, prompting a counter-revolution of today's youth who are sick and tired of working long hours and paying far more for their education than did their professors, and yet all too often getting off-topic rants and shrill scolds from an out-of-touch tenured class of elites.

You make the case for our success in the war on terror. But I worry that history books (some of which will be written by critics) will misrepresent what has happened in this remarkable four-year period. We worry about what is being taught in Saudi Arabia’s schools, but perhaps we should be more worried about the brainwashing that exists in our own educational institutions, in addition to the media’s unfortunate biases. Thank you for helping set the record straight.

Hanson: I’m not so worried, since I think in a free society the truth always comes out, and the accomplishment of taking out the Taliban and Saddam, instituting democracies in their places, reshaping the Middle East, and avoiding for some 52 months another promised 9/11 will ultimately be appreciated.

As long as scholars are free to write and publish, there will always be disinterested historians and an audience for their work. Take strategic bombing in World War II. After the war, the early claims of air supremacists were rightly challenged. But that revisionism led to an extreme position that bombing Europe and Japan was of little value, unnecessarily costly, and gratuitously punitive. The "moralists" cited ad nauseam Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, while the pragmatists pointed out to the bloodbaths like Schweinfurt.

But then the reaction to the reaction set in. And while no one today believes the canard that the "bomber always gets through" and admits that unescorted daylight bombing over Europe was a disaster in 1942, the totality of the air war nevertheless proves its utility in ending the Axis powers. We did harm critical industries; we took away enemy fighters from ground support; we compelled the enemy to make enormous transfers of precious artillery from infantry to flak batteries, and we forced radical relocations and dislocations of enemy industry — to such an extent that by autumn 1944 over Europe, and Spring 1945 over Japan, the Army Air Corps was inflicting horrendous punishment that had a marked effect in shortening the war. So I think that no one can stifle the truth, and that scholarship is an endless cycle of getting at "what really happened."

Take Vietnam. I grew up in high school with the shibboleth that Tet was a terrible U.S. defeat, apparently because CBS News choose to televise terrorists on the embassy grounds in Saigon or because Walter Cronkite assured us that we could not win, or because U.C. Berkeley and Harvard students waived Viet Cong banners. But in fact by the early 1980s, historians who sifted through the evidence, interviewed North Vietnamese commanders, South Vietnamese exiles, and our own veterans (their testimonia belied the Hollywood stereotype of maladjusted and drug-addicted psycho cases), discovered that the Viet Cong was nearly destroyed in the south after 1968, that Khe Sanh was an effective (albeit frightening) display of Air Force firepower, that Marine courage and skill were of a historic nature in Hue, and that in general the Communists had suffered a terrible defeat and were on the ropes.