October 2005

Response to Readership

Why has the Bush administration been unable or unwilling to provide the necessary leadership by convincingly articulating — to Americans, to those in the Middle East, to the world — what we are trying to accomplish?  His actions have tended to undercut his rhetoric at every turn. You lay out some real difficult problems that we face — something I haven't seen anyone in the Bush administration do.  If we don't know what our democratically elected administration is thinking, how can we possibly have any idea of what they're doing, or intending to do, in America's name in the Middle East?

Hanson: Our leaders need to work much more earnestly to articulate this war, and remind the American people that from India and Beslan to Madrid and Manhattan a radical virus of Islam is killing people for perceived grievances that have nothing to do with reality other than their own fantasies about the past.

So the President should articulate just that on Mondays, the Vice President on Tuesdays, the Secretary of State on Wednesdays, the Secretary of Defense on Thursdays, the National Security Advisor on Fridays, and then repeat the process each week until we are saturated with these explanations.

Only that way will the IED and suicide bomber not become the only narratives of the war.  We are winning: change has come to Iraq and Afghanistan; Lebanon is stirring. The Europeans are getting worried about Islamicist threats; India is now serious. And Iran is being confirmed as lunatic by the world community. So we must keep the pressure on, and the whole rotten edifice of Radical Islam, like the communists as the Wall fell, will come crashing down. It is past time to worry about renaming Infinite Justice to Enduring Freedom or apologizing when enemy terrorists who behead and blow up get cremated instead of buried, and simply win this war and let the Islamists know that what they started we will finish.

Again, less boastful rhetoric and politically-correct statements about Muslim sensitivity, and more quiet no-nonsense force against the terrorists is necessary. A great problem is that the Muslim community worldwide understands that the West withholds its criticism when terrorists in the name of Islam are exercising their swords and distain for freedom across the globe — everywhere as bad and worse than the antics and tactics of the KKK in post-Civil War America — while we apologize for silly things like a flushed Koran. That asymmetry only confirms to our enemies that we are more worried about what they think about us than what we think about them.

Also, the terrorists are aided by a cynical Western press, which seems less interested in revealing the courage and struggle necessary for freedom and more intent on settling a vendetta against Bush.  So, the administration’s defense, in our day and age, needs to be loud and incessant.

Let the Muslim world know that its silence about Islamic terrorism has almost turned a billion people into global pariahs, and unless they speak up about al-Qaedism a stigma will grow that will do great harm to Muslims for decades. They should not misjudge the present surreal situation — Westerners, Indians, Chinese, etc. give lip service to praising Muslims while privately they make arrangements to distance themselves from them — as real. Unless the Muslim Street renounces suicide bombing and IEDs, whether in Russia, India, the U.K., the U.S., Iraq, or Bali, the world is going to write off that part of the world as something akin to Iran or Syria, a dysfunctional region better left to its own devices. Time is running out.

What is your suggestion to the thousands of families in the U.S. that are now studying Latin, and even Greek, at home on their own?  Can you recommend in short a few books, a method of study and a short-order curriculum (for example, what should one attempt to master in the first years)?

Hanson: Various schools have guides, try the Hillsdale Academy in Hillsdale, Michigan for information about their Latin program. I recommend always Wheelock's Latin. For college texts, stick with Chase and Phillips, A New Introduction to Greek. Books on the ancient world for students abound; my favorite are by Don Nardo who has a dozen or so out.

For home-schoolers try to finish Latin grammar in two years and have them reading basic Latin in their third. I would suggest reading great orations, and then having students emulate writing in various styles as well as oral reports given without notes, as well as mock debates on set topics. I am not well verses in such aspects of early education, but from my own work with working-class college students, I tried to emphasize public speaking, writing in the style of classical authors, and memorizing key facts and dates — all the things we are told not to.

In some articles, you allude to Anglo-American solidarity and differences.  Do you agree the United States is more like an overseas nation spun-off from Britain similar to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, or is it a more radical new nation that has drawn parts of its basis from British culture and institutions, but fundamentally different from the former mother country as it adopts a lot of classical Greek and Roman Republican institutions and values?

Hanson: Well, we are much more similar of course to the U.K. and its epigones than to Europe in our common language, basis for law, and strong Protestant ethic. But America is also exceptional in being radically egalitarian in ways even the anti-U.K. elements in Australia or Canada are not quite. The seeds of a multiracial pluralistic society — anti-aristocratic and populist — were formed in the very beginning and have been evolving more radically so each decade since, to the wonderment and fear of the rest of the world.

We are like a snowball: our classical core was layered with the Christian tradition, then picked up the peculiar Anglo-Saxon strain of the West, and finally finished out with the veneer of our peculiar Founding Fathers and the frontier to make us unlike any civilization in history — one that is even emulated and envied by those who profess the greatest disdain. These past two weeks traveling around Europe have once again reminded me just how different we are from other nations — and how lucky we are to be so!

Many academics in modern history sneer at classics, thinking it is "overly moralistic and ignorant about studies of the human, social, economic, and cultural contexts that are indispensable to studying history".  In what ways do you consider this assertion to be valid or not?

Hanson: I don't know where that silly statement derives from. But the study of Classics — by nature ranging over several fields from archaeology, philology, history, numismatics, epigraphy, and papyrology — is precisely what the author claims it is not. Classics provides a blueprint of human nature and allows one to see the ways in which this universal commonality is warped and altered by culture. No one was more attuned to that than Aristotle or Herodotus.

The Greeks were empiricists — they wrote what they saw and heard, rather than what they simply believed on hearsay — so they provide not only a valuable aid to understanding earlier Western civilization, but a methodology how to study it. I am not convinced that social sciences have proved the legitimacy of many of its 20th-century disciplines in the sense that much of anthropology, social linguistics, ethnic studies, etc. are simply branches of literature, history, philosophy, and biology.

It is true that some classicists can be either narrow philological pedants or wild-eyed Foucauldians, but the subject matter is critical, and some of the best historians in recent years across the political spectrum, from  Moses Finley to Donald Kagan, were classicists.  So the assertion is entirely invalid. How can one study "contexts" unless one first understands the universal — human nature — that is affected by different landscapes?

Would you comment on the statement that Athens lost because "it bit off more than it could chew"? There is a view that Athens lost primarily because it was fighting more enemies than its resources could sustain.  This is probably a good lesson for the modern powers.

Hanson: I discussed this at length in A War Like No Other. Yes, Athens did not lose its war with Sparta, but rather with Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, Syracuse, and Persia. Sparta had neither the capital nor the seamanship to ever seriously challenge Athenian naval supremacy; but among Athens' five major enemies there was plenty of money and naval expertise — as the last decade of the bloody Ionian War proved. We don't know whether Thucydides wrote the famous encomium to Pericles — in which he validates Pericles' warnings about not expanding the war beyond the present struggle with Sparta — after the end of the war in hindsight of the final Athenian defeat, or at some point during the immediate post-Sicilian disaster, but the historian's authority proved decisive and that has been the communis opinio ever since: that a second-generation of less gifted leaders expanded the war beyond Athenian resources.

As far as the present, I think the U.S. can handle easily the reconstructions of both Afghanistan and Iraq; but I am not one of the zealots who press on for military confrontation with Syria and Iran. We may come to that, but if we should, it would require a complete mobilization of the country and its resources, and demand a casus belli so far lacking. Rather, let us consolidate Iraq first and let its ripples of democracy do their work insidiously rather than aggressively look for further military action in the region. Remember Iraq was not a Libya or Yemen, but the heart of the ancient Caliphate under the most repressive government in modern memory; so the stakes are far higher than we imagine: a victory will have enormous ramifications and de facto bring on others, a defeat proving a catastrophe for the U.S. for generations that will make Vietnam look like child's play.

When did America become a true democracy since, at the foundation of the republic, major sections of the population were disenfranchised?

Hanson: Democracy is an evolving concept, that starts with property owners, then all males, then all races, then women — what Plato scoffed as a system that would let the livestock eventually find freedom with humans since there is no limit on the extension of the franchise.

It is hard to answer your question since government rarely outdistances popular tastes, and in the eighteenth century most did not feel that women should vote, so it is hard to imagine a government instantly mandating such against the will of the people. Our constitution allows us to reflect social and cultural progress by incorporating new citizens, whether we call that process democracy (which had to be already in play for something like the women's movement or the Civil Rights Act to take place) or only the final product of equality for all citizens, I am not sure — since someone will say "How about 17-year olds, or why are not illegal aliens voting?"

What exactly did you mean the other day when you said we had, until the last couple of months, imposed a straight-jacket on ourselves?  We are now attacking and holding real estate in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. Why did we wait? So that the Iraqi army and police could go with us?  It seems more effective to have violently attacked two years ago and held the land to at least severely impede enemy operations if not eliminate them.

Hanson: Anytime one cannot use all of one's military assets for political reasons, the war becomes politicized, in that our use of force is measured not merely by its ability to hurt the enemy, but the effect as well on the civilians who watch it. Here the trick is, does too much force turn them off, or does too little win their contempt? So something like the April pullback from Fallujah was a hard call, but I think, from this armchair, probably a mistake, though one rectified brilliantly by its recapture in November.

Now, however, there is a growing security force and a legitimate government, partly because we were wise in working on a political solution, partly because this past year we stepped up military operations and demonstrated to the enemy that they could now not win. The cards are increasingly in our hands, as the Iraqis take control and will be in the position of asking for, rather than resenting, our aid, which in turn we can be less lavish in granting as we jump start them to take care of themselves. In war all this trial and error takes time, and we lost valuable months in 2003 trying to figure out the right course of action, but a synthesis of politics and force has emerged that is working.

Was there any truth to the Trojan Horse story?

Hanson: Sort of. This period between 1250 B.C. and 1150 B.C. encompassed the last generations of the Mycenaeans. Their final century of rather mundane operations, raids, wars, were fossilized and mythologized when the entire civilization was destroyed somewhere between 1200 and 1150, followed by a Dark-Age of impoverishment, depopulation, and illiteracy — a Waterworld or Road Warrior culture if you will — where tribal and nomadic pastoral people tried to make sense both of their lost past and the physical remains (walls, tombs, roads, etc.) that they could neither emulate nor even understand.

Thus, in this age of folk tale and oral poetry, exaggeration grew each generation, like a snowball of sorts that got larger the further it distanced itself from the actual event of the Mycenaean age. Who knows what the original Trojan horse was  — some rather mundane wooden offering to Poseidon left behind by a raiding party of Mycenaeans on one of their frequent sorties across the Aegean against Semitic non-Greek peoples? But this particular war was followed by the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces (cf. the folk version of Odysseus's wandering, Agamemnon's murder, Menelaus's delay,or Ajax's suicide), and thus became the stuff of myth-making by subsequent generations (perhaps only 1/10 of the population survived the destruction of the palaces) who quickly lost the art of Linear B, monumental palatial architecture, and sophisticated agriculture.

And then four centuries later, with the rise of city-state in the latter 8th century B.C. and the creation of civilization even more impressive than the Mycenaeans, these folk tales of Achilles, Perseus, Theseus, the Seven Against Thebes, etc. forged in the Dark Ages were codified and soon written down, becoming the canon of Greek religious and mythological doctrine. So when we look at something like the Iliad as "history", we must strip away contemporary contamination of Homer the poet's own 8th-century world, and even greater filling and padding from the Dark Ages, leaving a kernel of real Mycenaean history, albeit something probably mundane and hardly the clash of civilizations that Homer sings of.

How does you’re A War Like No Other compare and contrast to Donald Kagan's recent book on the Peloponnesian War?

Hanson: I think they are complementary. His is the best political and strategic account of the war in English, and draws from his monumental four-volume work completed over some 20 years of scholarly research. Mine is more a narrow military history that looks at how the war was actually fought from the ground up; and, remember, it is one mere volume to his four, and thus cannot claim to be as comprehensive. I have the highest respect for his scholarship, and do not forget his Origins of Wars, which has an excellent chapter on the Peloponnesian War, and perhaps the best explanation of the causes of WWII I have yet read, exploding many of the myths about so-called harsh treatment of imperial Germany.

I understand Egypt and Israel have a rocky past, but do you still believe that it is unsafe for a Jew to go to the country?

Hanson: More or less, yes. Consider the bombings in the Sinai recently, and the hatred that emanates through the official Egyptian press. Although Egypt under Sadat was making some progress in tolerance, and although there was always a strong tradition of moderation in Cairo that claimed to be the intellectual center of the Arab world and saw its roots in the pre-Islamic Pharaohs rather than Islam alone, in recent years, to hold onto power, the Mubarak autocracy has allowed terrorists to divert attention away from its own failures onto the United States and Israel.

Could you give an assessment of the relative merits of Grant and Sherman? I've held the opinion that Sherman is sometimes unfairly praised over Grant, thanks to his post-Atlanta exploits while the latter is often regarded as an efficient butcher who merely used superior numbers to exhaust Lee.

Hanson: They were complementary in a way. Grant was the bulldog that chewed up the Army of Northern Virginia, and proved alone of Union generals to possess the nerve to do the "terrible arithmetic" of stopping Lee. Sherman, who was horrified of the earlier carnage at Shiloh, sought to use the indirect approach to get behind enemy lines and cause havoc and panic that might accomplish as much as or more than frontal assault. So without Grant's death grip in Virginia, Lee might have sent troops to stop Sherman, and without Sherman coming up through the Carolinas at Lee's rear and ruining the morale of Confederate society in the deep South, Lee might have had more assets and the spirit to prolong the war and create a continual bloodbath of sorts, a perpetual summer of 1864, that finally would have broken the will of the North.

Both men proved authentic military geniuses, though I think Sherman's strategic vision was unmatched by any in the entire war. Grant's gift was to be able to size up immediately a battlefield, remain completely unmoved by the hysteria about him, and know pretty much the proper course of deployments, believing his mission was the destruction of the enemy army above all, rather than the Shermanesque notion of dismantling first the society that fielded such an army.

Both were relative failures before the war, both for their eccentricities and occasional depression (in Grant's case alleviated by drink), and their unwillingness to live life on someone else's terms. We quite literally owe the preservation of the Union to these two men, and had the North not had such a duo, it is likely there would have been two antithetical states in perpetual war against one another.

The arguments for confronting the growing Iranian threat today seem to me equally strong as facing up to the Iraqi threat. Why do you think the administration seems so much more hesitant in confronting it by, for example, supporting the democratic forces there?

Hanson: We need to do more to encourage Iranian dissidents. The administration's hesitancy probably hinges on three considerations: (1) The public is not ready to take on a third country, especially one much larger and wealthier than either Afghanistan or Iraq. (2) There is some hope that there is a sizable opposition in Iran that might overthrow the government in their own time and fashion. (3) There is also a sort of European/U.N. process going on to eliminate the threat of Iran becoming nuclear that poses a political problem for the U.S. should we attempt a unilateral solution in the aftermath of the Iraqi frenzy. So for now we are paralyzed and hope that what we suspect will happen does not.

Was the anti-war sentiment in this country greater during the height of the Vietnam war or during the isolationist mood of the 1930's?

Hanson: That is an excellent question and one I have pondered for a long time. We surely don't have the violence of the 1960s. When I was in junior high you saw each night on television bombings, the Panthers, the SDS and Weathermen. And popular dissent grew to include moratoria marches of several hundred thousand. The entire popular culture — from the FISH song to Mohammed Ali — was anti-war. But then again Vietnam took 58,000 lives, Iraq 2,000. So in that sense we may be well ahead of the past in our current anti-war stirrings. How odd though, that the military has learned much from the Vietnam mistakes, and so has fought three years in Iraq, removed its tyrant, crafted a far better constitutional government than anything found in Vietnam, and lost a fraction of our soldiers killed in the 1960s, while we are implementing democracy and opposing fascists.

I say all that since the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan anti-war movement baffles. I could understand their Vietnam-era anger if the U.S. Senate had not voted to go to war, along with the House. Or if al Qaeda and the Baathists were romantic socialists. Or if the sort who attack us in Fallujah and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle were not the sort who blew us up on September 11. So it is very very strange.

Remember the 1930s isolationists vanished after Pearl Harbor. I remember my parents saying that out here on the farm, all were skeptical of another European war, given that some were injured veterans, and it had not accomplished much in stopping the rise of Nazism. Then suddenly they said no isolationist was to be found, not a single one in the family after Pearl Harbor.

I may be unhinged, but I believe things are getting better in Iraq, that after the next two rounds of elections and Saddam's trial, the country will settle into a constitutional government, that within two years a some U.S. troops will come home, and that by 2008-10 many of the most vehement war critics, left and right, will be sorry for what they said during the midst of a war.

With a nation so divided, what — if anything — can we do to find peace and balance in domestic politics?

(1) I think we should be candid, tough, and speak the truth as we see it — but not demonize those with whom we don't agree. Attack their dangerous ideas, explain why they seem so wrong, but don't get into their personal lives, their looks, their past — all  that is really not much of our business.

(2) We are extraordinarily blessed. We talk of the poor, the jobless, the wretched conditions; but by any fair measure we are the most affluent and leisured society in the history of civilization. Go to any shopping center and see the mind-boggling array of goods that are carted out to waiting vans by consumers, or go to restaurants and see the food consumed, or even go, as I do about a mile away, to nearby poor districts and see how the once down trodden live, their houses and cars. For all our inequality, our poor have achieved a level of comfort that was true of the middle class in the 1950s. It is not third world poverty — despite the anguish. So at least acknowledge that the U.S. has done something no other society in history has — by extending the rule of law, security, and safety to 300 million people of all races and religions, who, unlike most in the world abroad, are not killing or fighting each other each day.

(3) I think it is wise too to disconnect for periods, read a novel, exercise, work in the yard, meet different people, do physical work — anything other than watching another story on Aruba, Cindy Sheehan, or Scott Peterson. We are so wired into things, that we forget that most of these stories are not stories at all, but phenomena of the 24-hour, all news cable cycle.

(4) Try to speak and write the truth as you see it — and expect to be attacked. It is bad, as I said to demonize enemies, but perhaps worse to keep quiet or to say or write something that is intended mostly to please without seeking to be accurate. So much of our speech is self-censored when it should convey truth. I believe that the untruth that we hear from a Jesse Jackson or a Hollywood celebrity or a George Galloway must be confronted and refuted, otherwise we are partners in their dishonesty.

The radical left has failed. Communism is dead, the only mystery being just how many millions of their own did Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot collectively kill — 80, 100 million? Socialism is fossilized as we see in Europe. Pacifism won't work in a world with Islamic fascism. Multiculturalism was a sham and a poor excuse for a successful multiracial model under the aegis of Western civilization.  Statism doesn't work, but strangles the economy.

So what is left for the Left? The fumes of the Civil Rights movement and Social Security, all the necessary things that were implemented decades ago. The Left's allegiance to forcing an equality of result instead of opportunity failed, and all the money and government can't make it work. So they are frustrated and angry as the country goes more and more red-state, and in consequence the rhetoric gets shriller and meaner. Gay marriage, anti-Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, abortion on demand, radical affirmative action, downsizing the military, higher taxes, more federal programs, radical environmentalism, all that will not win a majority of Americans. So the Left must instead turn to balancing budgets, supporting a strong military, avoiding special interest groups that offend most Americans — medicine apparently worse than the disease of losing.

(5) All that being said, maintain old friendships with those on the other side of the political debate, and resolve to keep them no matter how difficult!

What do you think of the "oil-spot" strategy advocated by Andrew F.  Krepinevich in Foreign Affairs?

Hanson: I don't think it is new, but very Roman in nature. One carves out safe zones, makes them prosperous, ensures no entry to the enemy, multiplies them — and soon those on the outside want in. We are already seeing that in Iraq, when thousands of Iraqis go up to Kurdistan to work and get in on the prosperity and safety. It is a wise strategy, and is not antithetical to going out on occasion and hitting the enclaves of terrorists, even if we cannot make them instantly one of our zones of civilization.

The theory is that by scattering these successful "spots" all over Iraq, soon they blend together. It is contingent upon having a large Iraqi security force that can handle policing once the bad elements are ejected or killed, and of course dependent also on a national political dialogue that is appealing to most, such as constitutional reform. So for all the slurs and caricatures, we are doing far more right in Iraq than wrong, and I think we are winning and the jihadists losing, and it will have enormous implications in the years ahead.

How will this all end? Some day soon we will take for granted a democratic Afghanistan and Iraq, assume it was natural, and then forget all the horrible things people said about Bush, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld as the perpetual critics move on to their new targets without any shame or memory of the damage they inflicted or the mess that would have followed had any listened to them.

The Chronicle lists you as a Hoover Institution fellow at the end of each article.  I recall you teach at a California State University, and I think at the Naval College, and perhaps other places.  How much of your resume is reflected by your association with the Hoover Institution?

I ask that because, I suspect that the Chronicle wants to be sure the readers know you are associated with an Institution that is "branded" in the minds on many as "right wing" (fairly or unfairly).   I think: why not mention your other teaching credentials?

Hanson: Columnists are asked to cite present affiliations, so here it goes:

I was for 20 academic years a professor of Greek and classics at California State University Fresno, near my farm in Selma, California (from 1984-Spring 2004.) In June 2004, I retired from CSUF as Professor of Classics emeritus.

I taught one year as Visiting Shifrin Professor of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis (2002-3), a one-year appointment given to various military historians.

In 2003 I was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in military history/classics, and after my 2004 retirement that became my chief affiliation. I drive up each week and spend 2-4 days in my office at Stanford, and it is my only full-time job now, hence the Chronicle's identification. I received my Ph.D from there (1975-1980), and my mother, aunt, and cousin went there as well, so I have know the campus and area well and feel at home. It is only a 2 hr, 45 minute drive straight across the San Joaquin Valley from my farm. The Hoover Institution is a wonderful and hospitable place and is as tolerant and open minded as its critics are not.

Also I am a visiting teaching fellow at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Michigan each September for a month during my vacation from Hoover. They have a wonderful campus and similarly bring the novelist Mark Halperin and the historian Martin Gilbert there under the same program of intensive teaching for a brief period.

I agree that I get a lot of flak from Bay Area readers who read my columns in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, and in the Bee newspapers, and I mean a lot of flack, some of it wild (my favorites are the self-appointed aristocratic Left who say I have no business as a Fresno raisin farmer to be associated with either Stanford University or a Bay Area paper — odd, this mix of leftist politics and snobbery). And much is made of the Hoover "right wing" affiliation, even though it is simply my employer and the Hoover is hardly right-wing, since some of the most vehement opponents of the current war, for example, are my own colleagues there. So the Hoover label is simply descriptive: it is my present employer.

It is early 1861.  You are Jefferson Davis.  Taking the realities of Southern society and the expectations of the Southern populace into account (e.g., pure guerilla warfare and freeing the slaves are probably out), what military and non-military strategies would you employ to win independence for the Confederate States of America?

Hanson: Well, since I strongly favored the Union side, it is hard to speculate. But Davis should have immediately unified his command and tried to incorporate state forces much more cohesively into a national army. He was clumsy on the diplomatic front and never won over allies abroad.

At home, I would have immediately moved the capital from Richmond further to the south. There was no real political program to lure in border states with promises of a loose confederation. But mostly after first Bull Run, there should have been an immediate drive on the symbolic prize of Washington D.C. Davis never grasped its iconic importance; thus when Lee went north, he sought a head-on confrontation with the Army of the Potomac rather than coming down on Washington from the backside and storming the capital.

Rather than bleeding his armies with inconclusive tactical victories against the North, he should have sent a Sherman-like general northward into the Great Lakes area or Pennsylvania, living off the land, and targeting industry and commerce, to show the northern population the wages of their support for fighting in the South.

That being said, Davis never had strategic thinkers in his service like Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln. He had brilliant tacticians in Lee and Jackson, but no one who conceived the struggle in larger terms of manpower, economics, social realities and national mentalities in the manner that Sherman saw the war.

Do you think that Islam is at war with Western civilization? If the answer is yes, when if ever do its symbols such as Mecca and Medina become legitimate targets? Is there anything we can learn from ancient struggles concerning strategies that might work for us in a battle against Jihadists?

Hanson: I don't think we are at war with Islam per se.

There is no caliphate, no unified Ottoman empire that seeks to spread radical Islam through the state, other than Iran which is containable. Many Muslim nations are neutrals not belligerents — such as Turkey and Kuwait. Instead we are at war with Islamicism, Islamofascism, or radical Islam, a branch not unlike the Bushido variant of Buddhism that seeks to reclaim lost Middle Eastern pride and stature by a return to a mythical theocratic purity.

It was incited by globalism that taught the Muslim street how far behind were the Islamic nations in the world economy; and it leaches off the misery of the Middle East, itself the self-inflicted product of autocracy superimposed on tribalism, polygamy, religious intolerance, and statism, and it is fueled by petrodollar blackmail money given by the dictatorships that steer al Qaeda in our direction. I don't think we want, then, to discuss targeting any holy sites at all.

We can, however, learn from the past, especially ancient struggles of the Romans in their long wars with an array of terrorists and national liberationists. We must have a four-pronged strategy: (1) counter-insurgency warfare abroad against terrorists who blend in with civilian populations; (2) occasional conventional attacks to take out rogue regimes like those in Iraq and Afghanistan; (3) political reform in the Middle East to drain the swamp of terrorists by enlisting local populations who wish their own autonomous, consensual governments;  (4) increased homeland security and immigration reform to ensure the likes of a Mohammed Atta never set foot on our shores again.

All of the above presupposes the absence of another 9/11 like attack. If that were to occur, or worse, a series of those events were to transpire, then we might well be in a different sort of total war akin to WWII, where we took on any regime known to have aided in the slightest degree the perpetrators.