May 2004
Response to Readership

Current Affairs and Classics

Do you have any other interpretations or thoughts on what is going on with Fallujah, and its broader implications?

Hanson: We should have moved immediately and taken the city, an act of resolution that would have reverberated throughout the country. Again, we are sidetracked with a false debate about troop strength when the real issue is how the troops that we have there are in fact used. The present hysteria is analogous to saying Alexander the Great needed 250,000 rather than 50,000 soldiers to subdue an empire of 50 million or that Caesar could not take and hold Western Europe with 40,000 legionaries, or that we could not land and move into Normandy when outnumbered 5-1 in Western Europe. I don’t think the problem in Vietnam in 1967 were only a half-million ground troops, but rather the absurd idea that we could not attack those in the North who were ordering millions southward.

Can you recommend a good biography of Julius Caesar?

Hanson: There are dozens. My favorite is an older one by Mattias Geltzer.

How much damage to our cause in Iraq has been done by the revelation of Iraqi POW abuse by U.S. soldiers?

Hanson: In the short term, a great deal of damage; but in the long term there may be unintended consequences that will work somewhat in our favor: Iraqis may see Americans disciplining their own—a very, very small number of those deployed— for maltreatment of prisoners in a very public and legitimate way, many of whom were murderers and torturers and recognized as such by millions of Iraqis. Let us wait until the trials are conducted and the guilty punished to see the final effects. We need also to know whether the pictures captured horrific things in medias res and were simply incidental to ongoing brutality or were in fact staged instruments of coercion in which guards posed and used the prisoners as actors in set scenarios for the psychological intimidation of those interrogated.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq we seem to be winning the war and losing the peace. What strategies would you employ?

Hanson: The two are quite different; Afghanistan is much calmer and of course was liberated 14 months earlier. Iraq, for all the chaos, can be saved, but we must remember that it is an Arab country with a uniquely terrible past, located in the strategic Persian Gulf, and with consequences for some 20 Arab autocracies that simply cannot abide a truly free Arab society on their borders. The transition to rapid Iraqi self-rule is a good thing— fraught with problems, but a good thing; if we use the troops we have more forcefully, give the Iraqis more credit and exposure, speed up elections, and maintain our will while historical forces start to kick in—an improvement in the economy, Iraqis in control of their government, and foreign aid—things will settle down.

My question to you is what are your thoughts on an entry ban into the US of males between the ages of say 16-40 from countries that have proven hostile to the US?

Hanson: I don’t think such a blanket rule is practicable or moral; but your mention of “males” is interesting, since I think a large part of the current Middle East pathology in many cases revolves around this image of the spoiled son, who is doted over by parents, kept separate from girls, and assured that his gender ipso facto makes him more privileged than women—whom he romanticizes, lusts after, and often despises, as is the case with all societies who practice a gender apartheid. So equality between the sexes would play a large part in undermining the jihadists—who seem to me to have a great fear of powerful, confident, and unapologetic women.

In your WSJ column, you mention “the machine-gunning of civilians at the No Gun Ri railway bridge in Korea.”  But there is powerful evidence that it never happened.  What is your understanding of this?

Hanson: Something happened and probably civilians were shot; but the precise circumstances and culpability remain unclear. The Army did an official report that could not confirm the accusations of (the Pulitzer Prize winning) The Bridge at No Gun Ri. From what I have read, I think there were civilian casualties due to poor training or culpability of a few—but doubt that it was as systemic a slaughter as implied in the book. I can’t think of an atrocity that is not under dispute. We are still arguing over the prisoners shot in Sicily in 1943.

My question is on Plutarch's account of Pericles, specifically, in my copy, the first and second installments where Plutarch talks about virtue and art.  What is he talking about?

Hanson: The old Platonic and Aristotelian idea of the need for practicality in virtue (“otherwise it would be easy to be virtuous in one’s sleep”)—Plutarch is not merely an abstract thinker (hardly), but wants us to read his Lives to see how we can emulate positive character and avoid flaws. And art likewise is pragmatic and can refresh the spirit. Plutarch believes we are in a zero sum life, where attention given to self-indulgence and frivolity is always at the expense of something more needed.

Is there any one event that, had the outcome been different, would have ensured a vigorous Roman Empire for additional centuries?

Hanson: I don’t think a single defeat like an Adrianople was responsible or a dramatic new idea like Christianity made the difference. Instead there was a gradual sense of Balkanization as regional culture, regional languages, and regional politics trumped the central government that no longer was able to unify a diverse empire and convince an affluent and leisured citizenry that Rome was far better than the alternative—a lesson that we ought to keep in mind.

Recently you have taken up the term "consensual government" with regard to Iraq's future. Can you please explain what this phrase means to you?

Hanson: It encompasses various types of legitimate governments that rule with the consent of the governed and thus allows one to speak of republics, democracies, parliamentary government, or American-style president/congress/judiciary under the general rubric of “consensual” rule.

Has, as stated in Robert Coram's biography, John Boyd changed the "Art of War"?

Hanson: I have not read the biography yet. He seems more a reminder of old wisdom than a creator of new. But Boyd’s emphases on challenge and response as a constant process in war, victory going to the side that makes the most rapid adjustments in the midst of war is borne out by numerous examples, especially from antiquity. And he was right to stress moral and spiritual factors that can provide victory even when traditional land, sea, or air superiority is lost. So I find he is a good antidote to presentism and our fascination with technological fixes when there are in fact age-old laws and trends of warfare that remain unchanged—water as it were that does not alter regardless of the efficacy of the pump of the age. Just as one should never confuse pumps with water—the latter is the essence, the former a mere delivery system—so too one must not conflate human nature and war with the latest manifestation of weaponry or “new” organizational or tactical methods.

It seems like every day some terrorist organization or fundamentalist leader from the Muslim world is warning of “dire consequences” for us in the civilized world. If it’s not Hamas it's Bin Laden’s taped messages.  Or in Iraq it's al-Sadr making ridiculous demands and the “Grand Ayatollah” al-Sistani threatening to issue fatwas. Does this empty rhetoric serve any real purpose or is it just the hot air it appears?

Hanson: I think about that a lot. It surely exasperates the West to see impotent, pathetic figures evoking the language of the 8^th century to promise ruin to us—even as they desire to emigrate here, import everything Western they can, and almost never chose themselves to meet Westerners in conventional battle. Why are their warriors always scarved or hooded and ours never are? I suppose these fatwas are intended, Tokyo-Rose-like, to weaken our resolve by their sheer creepiness. But most Americans find them silly rather than scary.  They certainly have a short shelf-life. The weaker and more irrelevant the Islamic fascists become, the louder they get—like the latest Hamas rhetoric even as its chain of command suddenly chooses not to brag any more about new leadership slots.

Are there any contemporary writers or thinkers who you often disagree with, but whom you nevertheless find to be worthy of respect and profitable to read?

Hanson: Plenty of them, both novelists and historians and philosophers.  I attempt to read magazines I don’t much like, whether the New York Review of Books, Nation, or the American Conservative and find articles on occasion there that are well- crafted if mostly wrongheaded. And I try to read European papers and magazines to learn of their always changing angst toward the United States. I don’t agree with Niall Ferguson’s notion of a new American empire, but admire greatly both his courage and audacity of spirit. Christopher Hitchens I thought was somewhat unfair to Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger, but I appreciate his erudition and his ability to speak the truth as he sees it—and especially not to pander to his hosts on television, most of whom he rightly seems agitated with. I profited from all of the Marxist G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s works on ancient Greece—not matter how exaggerated and wrong his conclusions. There was nothing attractive about the person, Arnold Toynbee, and most of his sweeping generalizations were crackpot; but there was a level of imagination and scholarship that was impressive and a lot of his work was worth reading. Again in my own tiny field, M. I. Finley was wrong about the ancient economy, wrong often about the role of class and status in the ancient world, and wrong about generalizations about everything from Sparta to mortgage stones; but his flair, engaging prose, and independence of thought made him worthwhile reading—I confess I think I read everyone of his books by the time I was 35.

How solid is the support of countries like Denmark and the Netherlands.  What explains their lone support of the US amid the rest of (Old) Northern Europe?

Hanson: I think they would like to support us even more—but it is not easy being so close to France and Germany that haven’t been so kind the last 200 years. And the mantra in Europe is EU utopian perfectionism where Belgian and Scandinavian-like socialism is the continental secular religion. Add George Bush’s Texas-Christian-conservative tones and I am surprised that they support us at all. In this cynical world we should not dismiss principles. In addition, they are small countries that have realistic strategic concerns and are very worried about demographic problems and Islamic fundamentalism inside their own borders.

Do you think you have underestimated the ways in which the values of the West have been modified and developed since ancient Greek times, the extent to which the Enlightenment bequeathed to us a moral imperative to reduce suffering, a sensitivity to suffering, a greater squeamishness about inflicting it or witnessing it, and that therein lies our military weakness in Iraq?

Who is George Santanya, and what was the context of his comment that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them?

Hanson: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” I think comes from his Life of Reason—a great philosopher who had a certain different taken on the US in part perhaps because of his Spanish citizenship and his role as an outsider of sorts. I have always wished to read his memoirs and novel but never have gotten to them.