Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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But we're getting at a core problem here, which is we have the best military, we have a military that can adapt, but it is the military of a democracy. In that democracy, or this cacophony of voices, and a press which will print all sorts of things, patriotism is of low value, unfortunately. So what does that mean? You're a person who understands the Western tradition and what the Greeks [might have done], for example. So how do we put those two things together, the military role that we may have to promote on the one hand, but then embedded in a democracy with all of its failings?
I go back to the historian Thucydides, because he watched Aristophanes' plays and Euripides' Trojan Women, and he understood the antiwar movement in Athens. He said that at very key periods in that war, whether it was the Athenian disaster at Sicily or the Athenian resurgence in the Aegean, that democracies when pressed, and when their existence is threatened, have all of these advantages of tapping into the imagination, the experiences of everybody in society, and they do very well. World War II, World War I, the Union army in the Civil War. However, when the democratic citizenry doesn't feel that it's engaged, is not put upon to contribute, then the things that you outlined, this natural hyper-individualism, this hyper-criticism, this hyper-cynicism, they all play.
How does that work out? It's works out through wars of existential survival, [when] democracies do very well. In long-term political wars that are not defined as essential, they don't do that well. And we see that, whether it's the French in Algeria or us in Vietnam. That being said, we can win this war if the American people believe that losing Iraq or losing a war to Islamic fascists will eventually create something worse than 9/11. So far, that hasn't been communicated in a way that's necessary, in my view.
Why is that? What should have been done that wasn't done, do you think?
Well, this is a minority view. I think we should have had a declaration of war against the Taliban, a declaration of war against Saddam, and then a lot of things happened. The whole problem with Guantanamo is no longer an issue because you're a POW in a war, you declared a war. Nobody in World War II was saying these poor Germans in Iowa or Mississippi haven't had a trial yet, they're detained indefinitely. Then you also have certain ideas: that if you're in a war, somebody doesn't go over to Iraq and broadcast about the United States, or somebody doesn't call the Commander in Chief the world's greatest terrorist, just like [Harry Belafonte did]. Lincoln would not put up with that, FDR would not put up [with it]. That's one thing that we could've done. Most importantly, it would've sent the message that this is a war, and that would've been very valuable. Instead we said, "Go out and shop, keep the economy going."
So, in a way, taxes too -- maybe we should've raised taxes.
Absolutely, yes. I could see going into deficit spending, and I could see borrowing money, if that was for munitions and manpower. But when you're doing that tax to just simply stimulate the economy, when it's already been stimulated by war, then that message did not denote a sense of urgency or national purpose and survival.
I get the impression, and this is my second interview with you, that you feel that when you're engaged in a war like this, you have to go for victory, basically, and all of what you just said would follow from that, that this is important, this is a clash of values or of civilizations, a way of life. You have to make that commitment, and you have to tell the people in a democracy what it's about.
We need to tell people in a liberal democracy, "Whatever your view on women, there's a consensus that women should be equal. They don't believe it. We encourage the rights of minorities -- homosexuals, for example. They don't believe it. We [oppose] gender apartheid. They don't believe it. We tolerate different religions, we encourage Buddhists and Muslims. They don't. We don't believe in sharia law. They do." There's a fault line here that's very important. When they came over on September 11 and tried to project those values of the ninth or eighth century upon us, then that was a war.
It's very important, when you go to war, you have these parameters and you say that we're in a war now, there are going to be monumental errors and lapses, just like the Sherman tank should've been better designed, just like the *hejeral fighting after D-Day should've been better planned, just like there was intelligence failures completely about the Battle of the Bulge. But within those parameters, [those errors] are not fatal to the war effort, and we're going to win.
In my own case, I wasn't one of these people who, during the Clinton administration, the Project for a New American Century [hoped to] re-make the Middle East through democracy, pre-empt, take out Saddam. But once 9/11 happened and you saw that nexus between authoritarianism and terrorism and autocratic fundamentalism, it didn't matter to me whether it was secular as in the case of Saddam, or religious in the case of [al Qaeda], like saying that the Nazis could never work with the Japanese because they're racist and the Japanese are not so-called "Caucasian." They were fascist and we didn't really worry about who was more fascist or what vein Mussolini and Tojo and Hitler were.
When you go to war, then you should keep that in mind, that unless there are egregious mistakes, that we can win the war if we have national resolve, unity of purpose. We have not been able to achieve that here.
One of the traditional ways of calling off the Western military juggernaut is always either to re-define losses in terms of "you're one soldier from the suburbs, it's much worse for you [to die] than a thousand of our kids from the slums of Baghdad," or to get other Western powers to call off -- I mean, the French fleet -- the French at Tulaine before LePonte of the Turkish fleet was there, so only three states fought at LePonte. So, if you can get France or you can get Germany to call off the United States, that's one way of doing it.
The third way traditionally has been to create civic dissension, that in the Civil War, if you can have riots to call off the army from the Potomac, or in World War II, if you can have a strike or something. Here in this war, the jihadists know, if you look at their fatwas, they're right out of the anti-war argument. In fact, sometimes they even quote, "Buy this book," and they mention the title of a very anti-war book published in the United States.
[Barnes]
Before we leave this though, one book of yours that struck me enormously was
the book, Soul of Battle. There, you speak of how a democracy, or
at least a society of polity and the culture, that has a surer sense of
its values and the importance of this can, under very difficult circumstances,
enormously field a military force that has a moral dynamic that goes and
carries all before.
I think so, and I tried to privilege the role of the commander, somebody like William Tecumseh Sherman, who really didn't kill very many people, but he imbued the army with an idea that "they started the war, and we are yeomen from the north and we're going to prove that we are not industrial tinkers" -- blasphemous -- "that we are better soldiers. We're going to go into the heart of the Confederacy and rip that thing apart, and show them the wages of their aggression." Same thing with George Patton: "We are not supermen in the Aryan sense, but we are far superior as democratic people, and we're going to go across France like you won't believe, in sixty days." In the case of the ancient general that I mentioned, Hamanandas, "We can do more in one year than the Athenians can in twenty-seven, because we're moving and we're going to destroy [what's in our path]." So, missing in this war is a commander who will say, "This war is for liberal values, and I've got a bunch of soldiers over here, I've got a bunch of women over here, I've got a bunch of people from different races, minorities, and they represent the future of the liberal West that's being attacked by these people, and they're not going to lose. We are going to destroy these jihadists and if they keep it up, they're going to regret that they did."
[Barnes]
But isn't George Bush that general, although he is not by definition in command
in the same sense?
At particular moments, at particular places, he absolutely is. That wonderful speech he gave with the bullhorn on the rubble of 9/11 at the site of the former World Trade Center, when he said the whole world is going to hear about this from you very soon, but when he says that we have to go out and spend money to improve the economy, or we change "infinite justice" to "enduring freedom" because somebody complains about the nomenclatures and is sensitive to the jihadists, or ...
[Barnes]
And we can't use "crusade."
Exactly. Can't use the word "crusade," or Colin Powell goes over to Pakistan and talks, in the middle of the Afghan war, about a coalition government, including perhaps Taliban, then all of these weaken that sense of purpose and competence that we can win. We don't have a lot of people who say we are going to defeat the enemy utterly and they're going to regret that they tried to destroy Western civilization. If you said that on this campus, people would think you need medical help.
You write in the book, and I'm paraphrasing here, in your conclusion, [that] democracies don't give generals leeway. The democracy changes its goals and is not satisfied, and this became part of Athens' problem. So, what I'm hearing in this discussion is that a military man who was elected, who presumably doesn't seize power, who has a feel for battle and the requirements of battle, and also has a sense of what America's mission has to be in this world of rogue states, that that is an alternative that we don't have now. When you have democratically elected presidents who don't have this military service, they don't quite make it. I'm overstating, but that's what I'm hearing you say.
Well, they don't have to have necessarily military experience, but they have to have confidence in what the military is and what it is for. All wars are expansionary. I don't think anybody who saw December 7 ever saw we were going to end up all the way into Czechoslovakia with the Third Army. Just by the same token, Mr. Lincoln said that we were going to war to preserve the union. He did not write the Emancipation Proclamation until the 1st of January in 1863. That was a whole new wrinkle to that war. So, Mr. Bush said that he was going to punish the Taliban, then some people say he expanded the war -- well, every war does, once you get in it and you start to see the relationships: why a man like Mr. Zarqawi would flee immediately to Baghdad, or why the Kurdish separatists are killing our friendly Kurds, have al Qaeda there, or why you get there and you find out that everybody from Abu Nidal to Abu Abas is there.
So, these wars are expansionary, and you know, really quite frankly, Shia fanaticism in Iran that may become nuclear is not the same enemy as the Taliban, it's not the same enemy as Saddam Hussein, not the same enemy as Zarqawi, but if you think that there are not parallels and commonalities that share an anti-Western agenda, then you're very naïve.
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