July 2004
Response to Readership

You once wrote, "I don't agree with Niall Ferguson' notion of a new American empire, but admire greatly both his courage and his audacity of spirit.” Perhaps, you would identify in a Response the principal disagreements you have with Professor Ferguson.

Well, he has written a lot, so it seems uncharitable to quibble. And I reviewed very favorably his latest book for the New York Post. But here it goes. I don’t think comments like conscripting the unemployed, ex-cons, and assorted illegal immigrants in the army for imperial service has much chance of practical application. And familiarity with the US reveals a strong isolationist streak deeply ingrained in the American people. Rather than berating us for being in denial about our present “empire,” he might accept that such a people are simply not easy for good reason with the idea of running the world. And finally I don’t really think we do have an empire—no tribute; we pay for bases; no land taken since 1898; allies that tell us where to go when we ask them for help; voluntary exits from places like Panama and the Philippines; no flattening of a Grozny when we feel like it; and a strong anti-imperial lobby on both the right and left that make it hard to spend over 5-6% GNP on defense. Also, I don’t think WWI was a mistake, but a tragic necessity in stopping something odious like Prussian militarism. After the last two years, I doubt Americans would do the Balkans again; and I’d be surprised that we care much anymore to “protect” Europe that is bigger and wealthier than we are. 

Why does America lack the courage we had 60 years ago? Was life simpler with no TV and no "up to the minute” news?

Hanson: Partly. We are more affluent, leisured, safe, and removed from the terror of nature in all its savagery — plague, famine, natural disasters, etc. We suffer from the Hamlet disease of finding a thousand reasons not to do something rather than one to act. That fact of decisive action is the single best recommendation for George Bush; he is a hedgehog, not a fox. And his one great truth is that he grasped that these Islamicists and their autocratic patrons wish to destroy the West as represented by the United States. And he really will act — not preach like Carter and give us the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a fascist Iran, not talk fire and brimstone and then do almost nothing in Lebanon after the slaughter of Marines like Reagan, not like his father stop short of Baghdad, and not go to Sandy Berger and focus groups and get us a cruise missile and a worried brow like Clinton. Intellectuals hate Bush for his action and failure to consult 1,000 different nuanced talking heads, but most Americans, when they get into that booth in November, are going to ask themselves one question: “does Osama bin Laden and the terrorist sympathizers want Bush or Kerry to win this election?”— and vote accordingly.

I have observed an increasing taciturnity on the part of students (senior military officers) to voice their patriotism. Martha Nussbaum touched on this issue in her essay "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" which seems to further the cause of "world citizenship." What are your thoughts on “world citizenship”? What is the value of patriotism?

Hanson: That bothers me too and is an artifact of eight years of Clintonism where officers accepted that progressive politics, not necessarily efficiency reports, were the key to getting advanced to the highest levels. The Left loves the peacetime military because it can make liberal changes by fiat that cannot be done to the same degree through legislative turmoil. Ms. Nussbaum draws on a few isolated quotes in the Socratic corpus about “citizens of the world,” where Greeks saw “Hellenism” as a universal idea, not necessarily predicated on a racial or ethnic concept. But what she fails to point out is that an Isocrates, for example, saw the polis spreading to non-Greeks—not Persian autocracy encompassing citizens of the city-state. And more often for “citizens of the world” the Greeks thought Panhellenic rather than 1,500 feuding city-states. My colleague, Bruce Thornton, wrote a great essay on her work in Arion magazine a few years ago that said it all.

Socrates fought at three battles and in his last speech mentioned all of them as essential to a review of his life and career. World citizenship requires a world state, and with countries participating in world governance like China, Syria, Iran, and Zimbabwe I want no part of it. We have a world right here in the U.S.—millions of people of different religions, races, and customs. Why do they act peacefully and civilized here, but not necessarily elsewhere? So I think I’ll trust our constitution, not EU or UN simulacra that are written mostly by professors, not men of the caliber of the Founding Fathers. One trait of world government we’ve seen: it always goes for the trivial (e.g., world court jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers) and ignores the real horror in its midst (250,000 slaughtered in the Balkans, a three-hour flight from the Hague).

If I understood your argument correctly - with the addition of a civil corps made up of one division - we would then have a military made up of 13 divisions. Is it your belief that our military should be expanded to 13 divisions based on the above format? Do you believe that this configuration of the military would meet the demands of the 21st century and the world’s war on terrorism?

Hanson: At least that many. But I don’t look at the problem in terms of divisions per se, but where they are. Someone must explain why over 150,000 troops (in all four branches) are in places like the Korean DMZ, Germany, Okinawa, Japan, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Spain, the UK, etc. when their hosts are not necessarily always appreciative of our presence and the problems of our age lie elsewhere. Having 80,000 troops in Germany while we were crying for men in Afghanistan and while a German president called us all sorts of things to win an election is crazy. I wrote an article about the need for something like a “first peacekeeper division” because I was worried that the first 30 days of a reconstruction seemed critical when we had to rush in police, technicians, liaisons, and indigenous forces immediately before the enemy got a second wind, woke up, and said, “Hmmm, these Americans won’t quite fight like they did a few weeks ago since CNN is here now in our hotels to tell the world how awful they are.” The “unforgiving minute” after the shooting stops is critical in war. And we need to remember that in the future.

Could you comment on this statement from Dr. Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist: “It was British and Canadian troops who fought their way through a German killing zone twenty miles (30 km.) deep, drawing German resources to the east of the beach-head so that General Patton's American tanks could break out from the western end and race for Paris.”

Hanson: This is a very old argument: “Patton raced through light opposition, while Anglos did the real unheralded slogging.” The fact was that according to the original SHAEF plan, 3rd Army should have been nowhere nearing the Rhine in September. That entire turn in direction, speed, audacity, and flexibility was the result of one man and one man alone. Of course, the larger war was a group effort – Germans directed good units against the British and Canadians and allowed the Americans some leeway – and vice versa. But if you look at the generalship in Normandy, then one can only credit Patton with real genius. And I don’t say that as an American apologist. I think Montgomery was probably a better general than either Bradley or Hodges. But Patton? He was something not of this world, a fluke of sorts. At some point Eisenhower should have said, “We have a rare – obnoxious, yes – genius on our hands who has upset all our careful planning. And because of that, we must make radical changes and direct resources to his mad dash into Germany.” The Allies were capable of such radical ideas – witness the doomed Arnheim campaign. But providing to a proven plodder like Montgomery overwhelming resources in hopes that he might be audacious, while denying them to a known thruster was lunatic. Nothing is as hard for a general as knowing that he is right, that thousands will live if his judgment is followed, and that he won’t be listened to for reasons other than military judgment. Patton, in short, was an American tragedy.

Can you describe the fighting style of Ancient Israel and its enemies in the time of Saul and David? Or can you point me to some definitive texts that do so?

Hanson: Perhaps look at some of the recent books by Eric Cline, especially on the history of Jerusalem and Mycenaean warfare. General Yadin had a long archaeologically-based account of biblical warfare, now out of date. A number of surveys of warfare start with the Middle East.

What Korean War history book would you recommend (alas, neither you nor Keegan haven't written one)?

Hanson: Neither of us have. Allan Millet’s I think are the best, Cummings’ the worst. I am afraid that we are nearing a new consensus that after 1952 we had the ability to push back the enemy far to the north of the DMZ and that the communists had taken a hit from American bombing and artillery that we did not quite grasp at the time. 1952-3 is a real sad situation—whatever the lunacy of Macarthur, he saw that stasis would only pass on something like the present problem to future generations. We can learn from that, and finish the job at hand now.

I was just curious about your take on French President Jacques Chirac’s statement that he cautions President Bush against comparing WWII and the War on Terror, because as he says, “history does not repeat itself.”

Hanson: He has to say that—or I suppose he fears that the French will surrender in 7 weeks again when hit. His country has not won a major battle on its own since the Napoleonic era. Worse still, in lieu of status and achievement it thinks fickleness, triteness, and controversy—blowing up a Greenpeace ship, stopping US initiatives at the UN, denying NATO allies help (whether giving ABM batteries to Turkey or overflight rights to the US), or selling Saddam a reactor—are signs of muscular independence. What the French do not realize is that they also think that Gaullism is simply understood by the US as “being French.” In other words, that deep down inside, we Americans love these guys and are amused by their antics. In fact, most Americans do not any longer consider them either allies, friends, or even neutrals, but in fact belligerents. We won’t see the results of this radical shift in American public opinion right away, but there is zero support for doing anything with France in the future. Even Kerry will learn that very quickly.

What nationality were the Trojans and language did they speak?

Hanson: From archaeological and philological evidence, Trojans were probably some sort of early Semitic people and their language akin to Hittite; but as a creative device “they” of course speak Greek in the Iliad to communicate in those wonderful dialogues and recriminations before the opposing warriors square off. There is a large bibliography both on the “real” language of Troy and on Homer’s use of Greek to portray speaking Trojans.

What are your impressions of Mr. Knox and his collected work “The Oldest Dead White European Males”?

Hanson: Bernard Knox is one of the great classicists of our times. Most of our current ideas about Sophocles and his characters—especially the Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes—in some ways derive from his criticism. He is one of those now mostly lost who did almost everything—military experience, ran the Hellenic Center in Washington, professor, poet, translator, critic—and is emblematic of the age of serious classics before the wave of postmodernism washed all that away. There is now not one serious critic of the classics in any major university who could write and interpret as he did.

I am very interested in the ways other writers do their research. When you are reading a book do you highlight salient points, make notes in the margin, etc? Also, do you have a certain system for capturing the most important points?

Hanson: I have an eccentric way of doing things. I start by reading solidly on the topic for about 6 months, take no notes, no marginal comments, nothing really but read and try to think about the main issues at hand. Then for about 3 months I just write out the book by memory in one long draft. Then for the next year or two I go back carefully through hundreds of books and articles, and add, clarify, erase, support, reject, etc. all the points in the original draft, doing footnotes or citations in the text in the process. Then I redo the entire text for points of style, general interest, and length. So it is a layering process. I think it fatal in research to adopt the idea that you just take endless notes or make note cards before writing a word. Some of the best paragraphs I have left in were hunches that I wrote in the early draft, and some of the worst were tortured “it seems,” “one could argue,” pages that were a result of reading everything written on a particular point. I’ve always advised my students to start writing at least something every early in the process. I usually count on about 3,500 hours of work for a normal book. And I have learned after a lot of them, that there is no way around that general figure, sometimes 5,000 hrs., sometimes 2,500 but on average about 3,000-4,000 hours—or a little under two years of pretty much 40 hrs every week. As one ages, disturbing questions arise like “Do I wish to give up 3,000 hours of otherwise normal activity to do this book?” So one really must enjoy writing and reading and be devoted to the project, or it is simply not worth it. Far too many books are written for tenure, academic promotion, self-indulgence, or polemics, rather than love of the subject.

I have been told that Israel is not a democracy. It seems odd, for example, that when they keep expanding their 'territories', the so-called 'new' citizens of Israel -- who were the 'old' part of Palestine -- can't vote in Israel even though they're a part of Israel now. Is it true that the new parts of Israel cannot vote?

Hanson: Arabs inside Israel are citizens and vote. The so-called territories, which have never been formally annexed, are a different matter. I am sure Israel did all it could to promote elections there post-Oslo. Arafat, not the Israelis, did the one vote-one time thing. The evacuation from Gaza and much of the West Bank will be interesting to watch: will the Arabs in an Israeli-free Gaza be more likely to vote, or the Arabs living a few miles away in hated Israel proper?

The problem with questions like this one is a matter of degree—like talking about Abu Ghraib while the world ignores thousands of Muslims killed in Grozny or thousands more blacks butchered by Sudanese Arabs. On a democratic scale of 1-10, Israeli is a 9 and Arafat’s Palestine is a minus 3.

It appears now to be conventional wisdom (even amongst war hawks) that we have made many major mistakes in Iraq yet I keep asking myself “What were those mistakes?”

Hanson: Well there were mistakes, though troop levels were not one of them. But the errors were not major enough to derail the plan altogether. Here are a few quibbles.

1) We allowed the looting to go on in fear of having to shoot 500 or so to restore order—and lost $13 billion in infrastructure and set an example of laxity; 2) the army could have been reformed rather than abandoned, that would have allowed the unemployed and idle to turn their zeal from shooting reformers and restorers; 3) we dickered at home and didn’t get the reconstruction money there in time; (4) we did not arrest militia leaders at the very beginning and then did not level terrorist enclaves which led to something like Fallujah, which should have been crushed.

But all that being said, the strategy was right and the ultimate verdict may well be ok. If we wish to look for stupid things, then we should go back and examine things like Okinawa where everything went wrong and thousands died needlessly—and yet today are rightly seen as heroic victories. Part of our problem is that ironically the 3-week victory set up impossible standards and expectations—and was not long enough to punish, kill, or humiliate Baathists who ran rather than fought.

My question has to do with the kind of democracy we see in countries like Japan and India. They seem far removed from Western style democracies. Will you comment on the essential differences?

Hanson: Both still are in some ways traditional non-Western societies, where family, class, status, and hereditary privilege matter much more than in the United States—and thus all put a lot of wrinkles into democratic government that must accommodate older and often ancient protocols (pre-1946). Even Aristotle, however, in his “Politics” is careful to delineate all sorts of different types of democracy that still qualify as ‘people power’. The key seems to be open and fair elections, some sort of constitutional framework, and an independent judiciary that protects individual rights and the rule of law over the tribe. And then there is the foreign policy factor. Modern democracies are less likely to fight one another; and thus we don’t see India or Japan threatening countries like nearby Turkey or South Korea.

What lessons should contemporary Americans learn from the period from the death of Basil II Bulgaroctonus and the Battle of Manzikert?

Hanson: Mutatis mutandis, stay on and rebuild what you destroy. Don’t invade an enemy country unless you intend to do it in force, know precisely who the enemy is, don’t trust all your allies, solidify your base before you invade—and don’t underestimate the Asian manner of war.

What would constitute "victory" for our enemy? Were you in their shoes, what would be your goal? How would you define victory and then remain victorious?

Hanson: An enemy victory in Iraq is something most likely to be a government of jihadists, whether Sunnis or Shiites, like Iran. An agenda of such a state? Get your hands on billions of petrodollars. Form a loose alliance with Iran and understandings with Syria. Undermine the Gulf States. Follow the Iranian/Libyan model of nuclear acquisition. Daily threaten Israel. Make the Europeans sell whatever you want, through a mixture of oil blackmail and loose talks about missiles, nukes, and launching ranges. So if they could turn Iraq into a Taliban-like badlands first, and a petrofueled theocracy second, then the rest would be easier. There are only two ways for Islamist governments now to threaten us: transform their country into terrorist havens (Afghanistan) or use petrol-dollars to buy nukes (Iran). Otherwise they are about as relevant as the Sudan or Somalia.

I'd like to know your thoughts about two books about Western intellectual history -- Richard Tarnas' "The Passion of the Western Mind" and Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence." Do you admire either?

Hanson: I know the latter far better. And read a great deal of it. I have liked Barzun’s work for years. Dawn to Decadence is a brilliant commentary, truthful about the Western propensity to turn to ornamentation, levity, and self-indulgence given its ability to promote individualism and create wealth and security—but without the Germanic determinism and crazy schemas of a Hegel or Spengler. In general, the Columbia tradition of great explicators of the West going back to Gilbert Highett and before will be lost with Barzun. We simply don’t train people like that anymore and with today’s pressures on graduate students to do theory and conform to ossified political views, an entire generation has been lost. Today’s graduate student does not learn philology, master historical data, or read great literature as in the past—one day of reading Thucydides in Greek is worth a semester of Lacan. In Who Killed Homer? We talked about this tragic decline in classical education. When I interviewed graduate students for jobs, I tired of hearing “phallocentric,” “construct,” and “privileging,” and reading all the creepy titles of their dissertations like “the poetics of masculinity” and “the construction of gender difference”—especially when they could not tell you what a helot was or where Argos was. Arrogance and ignorance are a fatal combination.

Do you have any recommendations for good historical fiction?

Hanson: I am just about to start writing a novel about the great invasion of 369 BC and the freeing of the helots. For Ripples of Battle, I went back and read 2-3 novels by Lew Wallace—wooden dialogue, but fascinating plot twists. I think the movie Gladiator was based on an early and now mostly unread play of his about Commodius. I’ve read much of Flaubert and even the early Gore Vidal such as Julian and liked them a great deal. Historical fiction, especially dialogue, is not easy.

Was Fallujah a "slick" bit of U.S. political maneuvering to punish the Shia'as (especially Sistani) for not reining in Sadr early on, for making to many demands in general, and for over cooperating with the Iranians?

Hanson: I’ve read that, but sort of doubt it. We were winning in Fallujah and can win again there tomorrow, if the Iraqi government asks us to. I wrote at least a half dozen essays on the need to finish the job and not let the doomed off the hook—who would then only interpret our charity as weakness, go on to murder innocents, brag of a “great victory,” and do what Islamic fascists and Baathist always do when they can get away with it: kill indiscriminately and destroy freedom. Violence increased after we halted; just as hostage taking mounted after the Spanish capitulation. I hope we get it— that nothing is worse in war in the Middle East than the half measure.