Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 6 of 6
It would seem that we're in a state -- we're sitting here in the spring of 2006 where the consensus, whatever it might have been for the war, is falling apart. You write for the National Review. I would like to read from a recent column by Buckley where he says, "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." Would you comment on what I guess Lyndon Johnson used to call the "nervous Nellies" which are also appearing on the right-of-center flank?
Yes. I've said that I have a great deal of respect for the people who contribute to The Nation magazine on the hard left, and the hard right paleo-conservatives say [what they wish to] in New American Conservative magazine. In between, over seventy senators and a majority of Democratic senators voted to go and take out Saddam. Most of the Democrats have [said that we have] failed, some of the Republicans. They say it was because of WMD, but in fact, that was one of twenty-three pretexts. The American people, when the statue fell, 70 percent of them liked that three-week war. But they don't like the three-year "peace," so they say it was WMD. My perfect war, your screwed-up peace, is the answer, and in the conservative camp that has started to infect them, so a lot of people who may not have been neo-conservative architects of democratic revolution, but the George Wills, the William F. Buckleys, the Niall Fergusons, the Francis Fukuyamas -- there's a whole spectrum. I don't want to [tar with the same] brush, say they were all the same about the reasons for it, but more or less, you can go back to every single one of them during that three-week war and you can find support for it, for various reasons. That has disappeared. That's disappeared when the polls went from 70 to 40, and the American casualties went from 176 to over 2200.
My only reply to them is that, 1) given the magnitude of the undertaking and the amount at stake compared to Korea, Vietnam, World War II, World War I, Civil War, we are doing very well. And 2) whether you like it or not, your opposition for something you once supported lends a lot of weight to people who may have a different agenda than you do. And 3) it seems to me that when you say you're for a war and you send people over there, and they're over there and you're back here, what do the 130,000 Americans who still believe, if you talk to a lot of them, that this is going to work, what are they going to do when the conservatives who supported them now think that it was a mess?
So, if you say, "I don't think it's going to work; it's over," well, what's the logical corollary that if you're in Kirkuk or Taji, you're sitting there and you think, "Hmm, Mr. Buckley's far brighter and better educated than I am, says it can't work, well, why am I here tomorrow then? Let me just go home now." I don't know whether Mr. Buckley or the other conservatives would really think that would be salutary to just simply leave and say, "You know what? We got close with three elections, we got close with killing a lot of jihadists, we got close with training, but not close enough."
What do you think will be the effect of all of this on our military? Will they adapt, or does that depend on the final chapter?
Well, they are adapting now, as we speak, and they're adapting in a sense that, whether they would admit or not, they are much more sensitive to casualties, they don't want as many Americans to go out, they want to train more Iraqis, and the $64,000 question that they cannot answer is, is this transparent to the jihadists? Do they know the restraints upon us, and are we emboldening them?
As long as George Bush gets up in the morning and says this is important for Iraq, it's important for the United States, as long as Donald Rumsfeld is not like Robert McNamara, as long as the Joint Chiefs and the people in Iraq believe in it, as long as the soldiers do, they have a window even at 40 percent public approval, because the polls are volatile.
I'll give you a final example. If Saddam is tried and found guilty and executed in a legal manner of normal jurisprudence in the next six months, if Zarqawi is captured, if Osama bin Laden is captured, if there's a government forum, if Americans are not being killed each week, all of this very quickly could turn into a Balkan situation where the American public has given a blank check for peacekeeping in the Balkans for the last eight years.
One final question. If you were thinking about writing a book about this period, "The Middle East Wars," let's call it, what sort of framing would you be thinking about doing? In other words, what would be the big questions? I'm not asking you to tell me how it's going to end, but about the big questions that were decisive in these campaigns.
I would say that, is Western civilization, as defined by Europe and the United States, at its greatest level of sophistication, education, affluence and leisure -- is it capable of maintaining a unity of purpose to defeat people entirely antithetical and willing to do things that we wouldn't even imagine to do to destroy us? Do we still have the ability to do that without quitting, or without giving up, or without surrendering, or without self-imploding with mutual recrimination? That's what's at stake.
Victor, on that note, until that book comes out, I'm going to recommend to our audience that they go out and buy your new book, A War Like No Other. And I want to thank you very much for joining us, and thank you, Professor Barnes, for joining us.
Thank you very much.
[Barnes]
Thank you, Victor, very much.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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