A War Like No Other - Interview

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A War Like No OtherAN INTERVIEW WITH VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

By JAMIE GLAZOVThis Frontpage Interview is with Vic-tor Davis Hanson, director emeritusof the classics program at CaliforniaState University, Fresno, and currentlya classicist and military historian at theHoover Institution, Stanford University.He is the author ofThe Western Way ofWar, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks,The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Cul-ture, andRipples of Battle. His new bookis A War Like No Other: How the Athe-nians and Spartans Fought thePeloponnesian War.FP: Victor Hanson, welcome back toFrontpage Interview.Hanson: Thank you Jamie for havingme back.FP: In your new book, you draw somepowerful and fascinating parallels be-tween the Peloponnesian War and to ourmodern-day conflicts. Before we talkabout that, can you first tell us a bitabout the Peloponnesian War and itssignificance?Hanson: It endures for roughly threereasons: First: the war pitted two anti-thetical systems-cosmopolitan, demo-cratic, Ionic and maritime Athens at itsgreat age versus parochial, oligarchic,Dorian and landlocked Sparta-and thusbecame a sort of referendum on thecontrasting two systems.

Second: the historian Thucydides whorecorded the war was both a partici-pant and contemporary witness and abrilliant philosopher who employed thewar to illustrate his tragic view of hu-man nature and how thin is the veneer

Victor Davis Hansonof civilization when ripped off duringplague, war, and civil discord; his de-scriptions of the plague, the stasis atCorycyra, the debate over Mytilene, andthe Melian Dialogue then are rivetingand almost literary in their power toevoke emotion.Third: Athens lost and with its spiri-tual and psychological depression endedthe city of Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles,Euripides, Pheidias and the dream of anenlightened democratic empire thatemployed its power and wealth in theservice of high culture.That has been troubling us support-ers of democracies these past 2,400years.FP: How do you think this ancient con-

flict can serve as a metaphor to someof our modern conflicts, including theterror war today?Hanson: Everything we have seen inthe present global war-slaughteringschoolchildren in Beslan; murdering dip-lomats; taking hostages; lopping limbs;targeted assassinations; roadside kill-ing; spreading democracy througharms-had identical counterparts in thePeloponnesian War. That is not surpris-ing when Thucydides reminds us thatthe nature of man does not change, andthus war is eternal, its face merelyevolving with new technology thatmasks, but does not alter its essence.More importantly, Athens' tragedy re-minds of us of our dilemma that oftenwealth, leisure, sophistication, and, yes,cynicism, are the wages of successfuldemocracy and vibrant economies,breeding both a sort of smugness andan arrogance. And for all Thucydides'chronicle of Athenian lapses, in the lastanalysis, rightly or wrongly, he at-tributes much of Athens' defeat to in-fighting back at home, and a hypercriti-cal populace, egged on by demagoguesthat time and again turned on their own.So the war is also a timely reminderabout the strengths-and lethal propen-sities-of democracies at war. And weshould remember that when we hearsome of the internecine hysteria voicedhere at home-whether over a flushedKoran or George Bush's flight suit- when160,000 Americans are risking theirlives to ensure that 50 million can con-tinue to vote.FP: Your book is a first rate military

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account. You are clearly an expert inyour understanding of strategic objec-tives in war. What strategic objectivesand tactics would you recommend toAmerica today in fighting the terror warin general and the Iraq war in particu-lar?Hanson: We need to know what ourobjectives are and where we wish to bewhen the fighting stops, and, as thefailed peace during the PeloponnesianWar reminds us, that it will stop onlywith the defeat of one side and the vic-tory of another. After all, there is noliving with a fascist jihad; in its ownwords, it promises to destroy all a lib-eral West holds dear.Otherwise, we have a classic belluminterruptum of the Middle East or Cyp-riot kind, and should not ask our pre-cious young people to die for a war wedo not intend to win and perhaps shouldgo back to the Clintonian strategy ofappeasement with cruise missiles andtolerance for the occasional harvestingof diplomats and soldiers abroad. But ifwe wish to stop all that and to go towar, then we must be determined to winand know how to do so.

So it seems to me we must articulateour goals: the creation of a stable demo-cratic Afghanistan and Iraq; a globalcoalition of Europe, India, Russia andChina that establishes that Pakistan canno longer harbor terrorists, that Syriacannot promote terrorism, that SaudiArabia cannot use its petrodollars topromote jihad; and that Iran cannotbecome nuclear in its pursuit of hyper-terror. We have had success and arereally down to these four countrieswhose behavior must radically change.We must establish a culture of ostra-cism for radical Islam. We are seeingthat now inside Holland, Great Britain,and now apparently France as well. Bythat I mean we wish to create a land-scape similar to what a Nazi felt in 1946or a Stalinist saw in 1989: that the ide-ology is bankrupt and no one will toler-ate it anymore, and praising suicidebombing in Haifa or celebrating IEDs inIraq is the moral equivalent of callingfor Waffen SS victories in WWII or praisefor the Baatan Death March, which earnsa person deportation from the West andsocial exile abroad. There is no reason,after Iran's boast to wipe out Israel, thatsuch a country belongs in the UN, orthat any civilized country would havediplomatic personnel in Teheran. Itshould be seen as Nazi Germany circa1939.We are not there yet in establishing

such a moral reawakening, but theseshould be our ultimate military and po-litical goals; defeat and kill terrorists inthe field; pressure and isolate their na-tional sponsors; and discredit their ide-ology. Do that and we win; fail and weendure the present sort of globalLebanization of seeing schoolgirls be-headed in Indonesia, or schoolchildrenshot in Beslan, or schoolteachers as-sassinated in Iraq, beside the sick car-nage from New York to New Dehli andthe spectre of escalation to the nuclearlevel in Iran.FP: What are your thoughts about theLeft's role in the terror war?Hanson: I am baffled by it. After all, alQaeda, Dr. Zawahiri, Zarqawi, and oth-

ers are not 1960 communist icons likeFidel, Che, and Mao, mass murdererswho deceived the gullible with their fash-ionable veneer of radical egalitarianism.No, what we saw on September 11,Madrid, London, Washington, Kabul, andBaghdad is a horrific fascism-anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-modern-that is atwar with all the Enlightenment hadachieved. So I felt a Chomsky, Moore,and the European intellectuals wouldhate fascism more than they dislikedthe United States, and this was at last awar against real fascism that the Leftcould get behind.In that, I was in error, and now graspthat whether we recall Michael Moore'scomparison of the killers in Iraq to "Min-utemen", or former Clinton advisor



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Nancy Soderberg musing about hopingwe "lose" in Iraq, or recent accountsthat French ministers thought a rapidUS victory in Iraq would be disastrous,we can detect a broad desire on the partof the left that we should lose in Iraq.Some are candid about that, othersmore subtle, but it is clear that US de-feat would be welcome to a variety fora variety of ways. Maybe if Al Qaedawere to go after Fidel or Hugo Chavez-in the way Hitler turned on Stalin-theywould eagerly at last join the frayagainst the Islamic fascists.This was not a war for Israel, not awar for oil, not a war for hegemony,but a costly dangerous, and yes, ideal-istic, gambit-and thus logically hated byboth the palaeocons and the Scowcroftrealists-for radical change in the MiddleEast, an end to the old pathology ofbacking dictators who allow terroriststo deflect popular angst against theUnited States. The only man of the Leftwho rightly fathomed that was Christo-pher Hitchens-a dream-come-true forproper leftists it should have been whenthe United States at last unleashed itsformidable power to help the oppressedunder the Taliban and perennially de-spised Kurds and Shiites. Like it or not,we are on the side on the underdogs;Sunni dictatorships, EU triangulators,and the global left, either by inaction orimplicit sanction, are mostly on the sideof fascists with a horrific past record.FP: What do you think of CindySheehan?

majority that did not blame the US gov-ernment for their losses. In that senseMs. Sheehan was emblematic of a pressthat reports only the IEDs, but neverthe heroism of American soldiers, andaccentuates the pessimistic, withoutmention of anything optimistic.FP: How do you interpret the riots inParis?Hanson: In two ways: the banal takethat is on everyone's lips is that Francefails to integrate and assimilate its"other" due to innate aristocracy, smug-ness, and racism so embedded in Euro-pean postmodern society. So this Pari-sian intifada can be a good reminder ofwhy would not wish to create such apart-heid ethnic blocks inside the UnitedStates. Paris is a wake-up call forAmerica to get serious about illegal im-migration, and begin to dismantle themachinery of ethnic separatism-bilin-gual government documents, etc., eth-nic chauvinism in our schools, tribal set-asides, romance, crack-pot historyabout a mythical Atzlan, etc-and workon improving the melting pot.But second, I was struck how few inFrance had the intellectual courage andintegrity to ask anything of the Muslimimmigrants: why did they come, whydid they stay, what do they want? Obvi-ously if life is bad in the west, NorthAfrica is a day's voyage away; so whyromanticize the culture you under nocircumstances wish to return to to, but

demonize the country under no condi-tions you wish to leave? Both the immi-grant and the naturalized citizen shouldbe asked that, and told to go half way:learn French well, the history and cul-ture of your country, and the larger tra-ditions of the West that you have cho-sen to join.

Yet when we see such inexplicable andcontradictory psychological states ofdesire and anger, then we realize theprimordial emotions are at play: hurtpride, envy, jealousy. And when youadd a jobless society that offers richunemployment benefits, then you havethe worst of both worlds: just enoughmoney to subsidize and encourage anidle cohort of angry young men, wholack the character of their fathers tosacrifice for the future, but have the timeand enough money to nurse their hurtsand envy with relative ease.

Even Mr. VIllepin will now realize thatthe logical escalation of all this is for aradical cohort of these intifadists toembrace the West Bank/London routeof real terror and bombing, especiallyif they sense French weakness and easyconcession. They should read the 3rdbook of Thucydides to remember thecycle of events on Corfu that spiral intosomething like Lebanon of the 1980s.FP: Victor Davids Hanson, it was a plea-sure to speak with you today.Hanson: Thank you for having meagain, Jamie.

Hanson: I think she is a tragic figurewho in her grief said and did things thatshe will soon come to regret, since shetransferred her anger away from thejihadists who killed her son to the coun-try that is trying to defeat such fascistsand allow democracy for millions fromKabul to Baghdad.The left energized her as a usefulpopular icon, and then when the dogdays of August were past and the chillwinds of November brought the nextmedia hysteria-Libby, Rove, the Miersnominations-they dropped her.The greater tragedy is the relativesilence about the hundreds of othermothers, both of the dead in Iraq, andof the 3000 who died on September 11,whom we have forgotten in the mediacircus that surrounded Ms. Sheehan.Most felt anger at the Islamic fascistsfor their violence, not anger at theUnited States. So if you ask the US pub-lic which grieving mother did it know,they would reply "Sheehan" althoughshe is not representative of the great


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A War Like No Other - Interview