Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Is what we're witnessing in the Middle East, putting our presence aside -- is there a civil war in the Middle East? Is that what adds to the complexity, with all of these different groups at each other, and so on?
There's a war against modernism. That's what this war is about.
But also a war within. Right?
Within the people in the Middle East, who are either Western educated, or they follow Western rules of jurisprudence, commerce, business practices, or they dress Western, or women who want to be treated equally. Those people have put their lot in with the West. They're not the majority.
The forces of reactionism want to bring back this world and promulgate this idea that we are secondary, we do not have status, pride and honor because we're not pure enough. Like all good reactionaries, whether they're Nazis or Japanese militarists, they always appeal to a solidified pure past where everybody was the same religion, there were no recalcitrant people, blasphemers, and this is going to cure our present weakness. It's not going to be science, university, liberalism, emulating this decadent West.
That's what the war's about, and it doesn't really matter whether they're Iranians, or Jordanians, or Iraqis, or Taliban Afghans. And it doesn't mean that we're against the people. See, in 1941 you can't find anybody in Europe who's not a declared Nazi. French, Turkish, Spaniard, they all think Hitler's great right before he invades Russia. In 1946, you can't find anybody who's ever for Hitler. Just like in 1946, everybody's for Stalin. In 2003, you can't find a Stalinist very often in Europe. It's because these belief systems have to be defeated, humiliated, discredited, and bring injury to the people who embrace them. Then the majority will cast them off. Once you destroy and isolate and humiliate Islamic fascism, nobody will want anything to do with it, just as we see in Afghanistan. Most people do not, the polls all suggest, want to bring the Taliban back.
[Barnes]
So, this war isn't going to be over when we lead the troops out of Iraq.
There are going to be [other] theaters, but this war is not going to be over until, [when] somebody who stands up in the Middle East and says, "I want to destroy the West, I want to blow up another Trade Center ... " -- 'til somebody says, "Don't say that. Stop that. We're not going to put up with that."
[Barnes]
And you can do that without a Hiroshima, or an invasion and destruction of
Berlin?
We don't know. What we at least know is this: we have told the Islamic fascists that we are willing to isolate and attack you, and at the same time offer an alternative between you and dictatorship for the majority of people, now this is what we're willing to do. However, if you insist on -- I mean, we're starting to see an escalation with Madrid, London, French rioting, Danish cartoon, fatwas here, fatwas there. If they continue to escalate, I don't think they understand there will be a requisite Western escalation, and we're already seeing that in Europe. Historically speaking, the Middle East should take a deep breath and say, "We are one billion people in a planet of six billion, and what we know from the history of the civilization on this planet is Western civilization is absolutely lethal when it's pushed to the edge, and we do not want to go there."
[Barnes]
Carnage and culture.
Yeah, they need to say that.
Let's draw on your work as a historian and a classicist to ask, how do you think this will play out, and what do we need to make it play out in the right way? You have a military that can adapt with the right resources, that can win, but do you feel that the way we handle this next stage in Iraq will determine and have very great implications for what happens in this war that you're describing?
Absolutely. There's literally tens of millions of people who are modern. We saw that of the people who wanted to demonstrate in Jordan against Zarqawi. There are people in the Gulf -- if you go to Kuwait City, there are people who made that decision. They're watching Iraq and they're saying, "Are the forces of modernism going to be here to give us support and aid and encouragement? If we leave, then the neighborhood Islamicist who wants to chop somebody's hand off or behead somebody he doesn't like is going to be the new authority figure we have to deal with."
By the same token, we're worried about Iran being subversive to Iraq, but the Iranians, we must remember, are worried about us because the Iraq experiment, if they have a full blown democracy, can be very subversive to Iranian theocracy. [If] you have a democracy in Iraq, [if] you have a democracy in Afghanistan, [if] you've got liberalization in Lebanon and Kuwait and Israel, suddenly the world doesn't look so good for Islamic fascism in Iran. So, this war is for all the stakes, it really is.
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