September 2006

Response to Readership

How will we respond if Iran or Hezbollah launches a nuclear weapon against Israel? Would, in that circumstance, a nuclear response still be "disproportionate"?

Hanson: I'm not privy to U.S. thinking, but two considerations come to mind since you are talking about a post facto, rather than a preemptive, strike:

(1) The Israelis would, I think, react well before us and in a matter of minutes; and given the relative arsenals, we could expect several reprisal bombs for each dropped on the Jewish state.

(2) It would be the role, I imagine, of the United States to intervene in two ways: first, to warn other nuclear states such as Pakistan or North Korea, and others unnamed that if they were to join in on the attack, they would be subject to U.S. countermeasures; second, that if the strike against Israel were multifaceted (currently impossible), and somehow managed to reach the hardened silos and to destroy all of Israel's arsenal, then the United States might intervene to reestablish the very critical principle that a preemptive nuclear attack on an American ally might well ensure the aggressive state's own destruction

All this is nightmarish to contemplate, even in the realm of the hypothetical.

With all the inaccuracies we read and see in modern media, do you think we will ever have an accurate historical account (versus opinions) of what transpired at the highest levels of government that got us into the war in Iraq and determined how it has been fought? Based upon this answer, how accurate do you think the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans were in recording their historical military events?

Hanson: We will get finally a fair assessment, but it will take years, as we see at last in the case of the Vietnam War. Right now we are getting only journalists' dispatches and angry criticisms from insiders, both correspondents and former officers. Soon scholars will look at all the evidence, especially in light of what Iraq might look like in 2010 rather than 2004 or 2005.

What worries me is the zeal with which mistakes are trumpeted, but rarely the successes, and of course the lack of documentation or the use of pseudo-footnotes and citations such as "senior Pentagon official" or "unnamed military official." I could not write a history of the Peloponnesian War and footnote something like "unknown inscription" or "private reading of an unpublished manuscript of Diodorus".

The validity of Greek military history is discussed by Thucydides in his famous discussion about subjective truth, or whether the historian can include things that a speaker should or might have said when facts are faulty, but impressions and speculations seem warranted. In general, though a Xenophon or Polybios, given knowledge of their biases (Xenophon, for example, hates Thebans), offers a reliable record that can be partially confirmed by other epigraphic, literary, and archaeological sources. While we are all skeptical of the docu-drama, we seem less willing to be wary of its literary counterpart like the Woodward genre of impressionistic journalism that purports to be history.

What is your view of Russia’s role in the Middle East conflict and its relations with the U.S.? Russia was selling arms to Hussein. Russia is now selling arms to Iran, Syria, and Hamas. Following this is the billion-dollar arms deal to Venezuela. All these countries are antagonists if not direct enemies to the U.S.

Hanson:  Russia has a variety of motivations. Some are matters of lost pride after the fall of the Soviet Empire. By causing trouble for the U.S. it gains attention. Money is to be made selling arms and keeping its once vast munitions industry busy. Oil has empowered it enormously, and it understands that selling petroleum know-how is a lucrative business, while most clients will buy oil no questions asked.

And remember, it is less than 20 years away from 70 years of a murderous atheistic culture that destroyed almost all sense of morality and ethics. That entire Soviet generation who came of age in the 1980s must pass, and then we must hope that someone was left in Russia to inculcate morality other than the old Soviet 'might makes right.' All that being said, we are light-years ahead of the Cold War, so anything not Stalinist in Russia is an improvement of sorts.

To what extent do you think the application of the concept of the "Great Souled Man" found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is relevant, especially for individuals in modern democracies who must determine their political allegiances and decide to either embrace or shrink from questions of force?

Hanson: A theme in all classical political theory — Plato and Aristotle most of all — is the role of naturally gifted men, who can find no avenue for their exceptionalism in democracy, given its tenets of radical egalitarianism and suspicion and envy of the extraordinary. That being said, the rare willingness to risk confrontation, to endure, or even to welcome the odium of the mob, is seen as a positive characteristic. An Aristides, Pericles, Epaminondas ("princeps Graecia"), Thrasyboulos, or Timoleon were seen as singularly virtuous by classical political commentators from Aristotle to Cicero for their restraint and moderation, but also because they couldn't be swayed by the mob. The locus classicus is Book II of Thucydides, where the historian offers an encomium of the qualities of the dead Pericles. Being "above things," without arrogance or disdain, seems to be the defining trait of the megalopsychos.