Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 2 of 6
You were recently in Iraq, so Tom, would you like to start off and ask some questions about the war in Iraq?
[Barnes]
I would very much like to. I had the chance earlier today, Victor, to talk
to you a little bit about -- when you were in Kevin Adams' class -- the
way the war is going and your view of the dynamics of it.
I was there in February. I'll be back, I think, on March 6 for a longer stay. What's interesting about this war -- if I could use that word, "interesting," about something that's so bloody -- is it's changing all the time, and evolving, so the war in 2006 is not what it was in 2005, which is not 2004, 2003.
[Barnes]
And that comes as no surprise to you, of course.
No surprise.
[Barnes]
But it does [engender] surprise [in others].
Yes, it does. The rhetoric is still "Bush lied, thousands died," but what's happening in Iraq is one massive training exercise. If you go to a hospital in Balad, [you see] the doctors, the nurses, Iraqi side by side [with] the Americans. If you see the convoys, then you see Iraqi, American, Iraqi, American, side by side. If you go to Taji, you see an Iraqi division being formed with American advisors. The idea is -- to use that now discredited word, "Vietnamization" -- it's Iraqi-ization. They're trying to teach people to take over responsibility. Whether that security is going to allow the government to form, or the government must form to allow there to be security, people are unsure of. But the military, at least, can't worry about that. They're trying to train an Iraqi security force and a civil society that will give breathing space for the politicians to form this government.
[Barnes]
Can they do it?
I think they can do it. We did not see an all-out civil war after the explosions at the Great Dome in Samara, but it's not going to be birthed in 2006. I think it'll go on to 2007. I think that within twenty-four months, if we stay the course, a contingent of 50,000 to 60,000 Americans can continue to train, and more importantly, provide the psychological support that we see in Korea today, or Japan today, or Germany today, or the Balkans today, or Panama today, or Afghanistan today. We're all over the world. We usually have to do that.
[Barnes]
So, the war is going to be over in 2007, 2008?
Not over. I think that the American role, within a year or two years, will be entirely one of training and air power. I don't think you will see American soldiers going out on patrols and taking an active part fighting and killing Iraqis. The idea is militarily we will have trained a half million people who can do that in service to an elected government, and then politically it is that our presence is so ambiguous now that we're better served by staying in bases and supplying the know-how.
Politically at home, people realize that there's a finite limit to a war that can be conducted with 40 percent public opinion. My own view is that if the administration would explain this and try to say, once again, "We did not get oil" -- the price skyrocketed after we went in -- "we did not install a shah, this is not an imperial pro-consulate that we're trying to craft; it's the biggest foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan to a particular targeted area." It's very idealistic and maybe naïve, it may be foolish, but it's not realpolitik that they could win adherents and tap into the American character and traditions of magnanimity. That moral argument has not been sufficiently aired, I think.
[Barnes]
Now when this is over, is Francis Fukuyama going to be able to write another
book about the end of history, or are we going to go on to another war?
[Kreisler]
Or more history?
I don't know if we're going to go on to war, but somebody [will] until the end of history happens, and that's not going to happen until we're all on the other side of the river, so to speak, until the end of things. It doesn't have to be that depressing, though, because history can also be optimistic. We know what stops wars. What stops wars are military deterrents, and more importantly, democratically elected governments are less likely to attack other democratically elected [governments]. They attack everybody else, but are less likely to get -- and we're living in an age where there are more democracies now than in the history of the planet, so in theory, if these democracies would not fight with one another and they would practice hard-headed deterrence against the non-democratic states, then perhaps we could be in a series of 200 years, 300 years -- I don't know.
[Barnes]
So, a perfect Westphalian situation, once again established.
In your book, you raise two things. One is how well the military is doing and how it's adapting, and I want to talk about that first. You wrote [that] the Peloponnesian War taught the West that the logic of military efficiency would trump tribalism, tradition, and arbitrary constructs of wealth and power. I want to apply that today. We know that we have the best and finest military, and that answers the question about military victory, but what are your thoughts after having been in Iraq about how we can help a people transcend tribalism, tradition, and so on? Because that seems to be a problem here.
What we're trying to do is tell the Muslim world in the Middle East that, "Your fascination, that you chose on your own to turn on the computer," (and the internet's everywhere in Iraq,) "to put in a DVD, to put a satellite dish, is parasitic on Western culture. You like the pizzazz, you like the technology, you like the cell phone. But as yet, you can't create or fabricate or improve, or even fix, a lot of that stuff. You have a fascination for the wealth, the capital and the modern entity of the West, but that's going to collide with your traditional belief systems, your autocratic political systems, your notion of patriarchy, all these other problems. What we're suggesting to you is, here is another realm of the Western world that you really don't get much of, because we have been culpable in the past of supporting dictatorships or authoritarians. So we're going to give you the choice: if you want to, you can create an open society. You can remain Muslim, that's your business, but at least you have the opportunity, a third choice, it's not just Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood or Mubarak. And out of that complex system of freedom, tolerance, religious tolerance, the equality of women -- all of these other things will be changed, adopted, rejected, on your own terms."
The system we have now is parasitic. Everybody in the Arab world, it seems to me, is living in an autocratic society that's failing by any measure of international commerce or economic barometers, and then these dictators make this devil's bargain with Islamicists and fundamentalists who say, "You can say whatever you want about the West but not about us." They in turn say, "It's because we're not pure, we're not back in the eighth century, and all of this [modern] stuff is corrupting you."
The person who is the recipient of all of this so-called, mythical Arab "street" almost hates the very desire for things Western. It only increased the guilt that they either can't make it or it's against Islam. So, it's a very hard thing to do, but ultimately the only solution is to offer people the other side of Western civilization that's liberal and humane and tolerant.
To do that, does the military have to do more of what Barnett calls "system administration"? Prior to the Bush administration it was called nation building. In other words, the military is doing that. Is that a piece of the program, that they have to have to move from one world that you're talking about to the other?
Yes, absolutely. I'll give you an example of one or two situations. If you go to Balad, or you go to the Baghdad hospital, most of the people brought into an American-run hospital are Iraqis, but what's fascinating is the people who are letting off the IEDs and the suicide bombs are there too. The Americans say they [too] are entitled to a Hippocratic notion of medicine: "Bring them in even though they tried to kill us and you. We will treat them, maybe under guard, and we will show you how medicine in a Western sense works." I know that that may be naïve a certain amount, but that's an example.
Or if you're an American colonel and you're trying to train the new Iraqi tenth division, and you're trying to talk about discipline and chain of command, you also say that even though you have body armor, up-armored RMVs, you have your own budget, you cannot under any circumstances challenge the authority of the civilian government. You are subject to them. You can complain, but there's a chain of command that ultimately stops with civilians. They control you.
So, what the Americans are doing at every single level is trying to imbue a very traditional tribal society with what we would call a modern Western world, whether it's medicine or civilian military affairs. I could magnify those examples, but that's what you're talking about, and the answer is, yes.
It would seem that part of this [is] not the military power or military victory, but the security element, the policing function that needs to be implemented and taught to the people whose country it is. Is this something that our military should do in this transitional phase, or is it better to bring in police from the United States?
They're doing that. We are bringing in police from the United States, we're bringing people through the National Guard that have police experience, we have military police, but it's, again, a multifaceted effort. The military thinks the most incorrigible diehard terrorists have to be killed or exiled: we can help you do that and we will. But when they go into a multi-level apartment that somebody else owns and we put a GPS bomb and blow them up, we have to calibrate: is it better to get rid of the eight people or is it better not to destroy somebody's property who's not sympathetic to them? Those decisions are being made hourly in Iraq, and then the idea is that it's circular. We kill the jihadists and train the security forces, then that gives a breathing period for the third elected system of officials to form an executive branch. When they form an executive branch of national reconciliation, then they take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency, and then it makes it easier, even more, and it's holistic. I didn't meet any military officer -- and I met General Casey, General Dempsey, General Corelli -- that thought that there was simply a political or military solution. It was symbiotic.
Next page: War's Asymmetry
© Copyright 2006, Regents of the University of California