Victor Davis Hanson: Critical Mass, We are reaching a showdown in this global war.

NRO ^ | December 12, 2003 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Tuscaloosa Goldfinch]

Excellent article.

[theFIRMbss]

> ... our covert enemies obtain aid and comfort in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc. ... We are in deep denial. Eventually the reality will confront us again--when the Sears Tower comes down, or the Golden Gate bridge is demolished.

Don't forget, French arms
have been used in Iraq, and
French "journalists" have

made no secret of
traveling with Iraqis...
If Germany and

France are actively
supporting bad guys, this war
then looks even worse

than if we're only
in denial about "friends"
in the Middle East...

[Tolik]

This is one of his appeals to me. He looks at the current events with perspective of history. Lots of people, pundits and forum participants alike, make a common mistake of looking  at the events like they happened in vacuum, without relation even to the very recent history. VDH favorite point is that the nature of man did not change that much during the last millenniums, and we can learn a lot by analyzing classic history and later battles as well. BTW, he was a visiting professor in the Annapolis Naval Academy for a year just recently. I am jealous to those who had opportunity to study with him.  I bought and read his book on important battles. Very interesting. (Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power ) One of his thesis is that the Western warrior is deadlier in battle because he is a free man. More of his books are here.
 

[Gritty]

Baathists and al Qaedists hope to demoralize our electorate and bring in a Howard Dean or his clone and with him a quick American exit from Baghdad.

As usual, Hanson cuts to the quick.

A great article, by a great modern historian!

And if there were another September 11, then all voluntary restrictions on the use of the full extent of American power will be off — and the response would be too terrible to contemplate.

I don't think our enemies, either foreign and domestic (and I include the fellow-travelers in the Democrat Party), realize this fully. They will, if it happens!

[Carry_Okie]

There are plenty of third-world revolutionaries today, but very few who wave the hammer and sickle.

Venezuela, Brazil, IIRC Ecuador, and parts of Colombia come to mind.

[KC_for_Freedom]

Boris, you are quite right, and the battle will go on for a long time. But that does not mean a critical point will be reached in 04 both here and in Iraq. Iraqis are even now trying to decide whether they want to support the coalition or Sadam's waning forces. There is fear, because they are not sure who will win. But as they become sure they will join us in greater numbers. Will terrorist attacks stop? Have they stopped in the US? The answer is that terrorist attacks will stop when people wake up and see dead terrorists lying in the street, the result of our special ops forces doing them in in the night.

Whether we ultimately have lost or not is also still up in the air. We are fighting the rise of Islam and it can only take a terrorist form of battle. Until we realize that we must fight it at its level, we will have setbacks.

[.cnI redruM]

>>>>>>>>>In the last two years our enemies have lacked not the will but the power to defeat us; we in contrast had more than enough power but not enough will. But all that is changing as we ever so slowly become angrier while they get weaker.

Wow. VDH is someone I have to read 2 or 3 times. He's both deep and brilliant.

[Cicero]

Obviously the most dangerous factor at the present time is the enemy within--the peaceniks, the leftist academics, the Democrats, the leftist media, the leftist entertainment industry--all working together in hopes that Bush will fail.

Before things improve they will very likely, as Hanson suggests, seem to get worse. Terrorist activity will increase. The Democrats and the media will pull out all the stops as November 2004 approaches. We must hope for a crushing Bush victory, because although Bush can be faulted on many subsidiary issues, he is clearly the better choice on the main issues: pursuing the war on terror, reforming our tyrannical judicial system, and rolling back the Culture of Death.

[Tolik]

Boris, I agree with practically all your points, especially on the "home front". "Invading the wrong country" is disputable. My understanding is while Bush was willing to go alone, nevertheless he was trying to get some kind of international support as well. A country under UN sanctions and a known felon looked like a better candidate for consensus than any other. What he underestimated is how far other major powers and American Leftists are going to go in obstructing US efforts regardless of morality and merits of this effort. We are blamed for the unilateralism anyway and are called empire doesn't matter what we do, so we could as well act like one.

Another  troubling point was and is the oil supply. In Iraq, at least, we have a potential of sympathetic populace, nothing like that can be expected from the Saudi Arabia. While there are options how Iraqi oil can be dealt with, there is no options with Saudi Arabia. To secure their oil we'd need just take over the oil fields straight up. You can find support for such actions here on FR, but in the real politics, its problematic. We might end up doing just that, but you can't start with it.

VDH said many times that this is a long struggle. Here he says that a turning point maybe around the corner. So, he is trying to be more optimistic today. Where he is indisputably right, is in the history of people following the winners. All Nazi sympathizers kind of melted away after the WWII. Not that their sympathies changed all of a sudden, but they stopped acting on them. Projecting a victorious power is very helpful in the war effort. Even if it doesn't win outright converts, it freezes in inaction those who would follow the enemy.

[mac_truck]

Let us pray that the Olympics go well — despite the fact that they take place in the eastern Mediterranean, among a populace that is both without formidable military power and has expressed in a recent poll (by nearly a 90-percent majority) the belief that the United States is the chief threat to world peace.

Worth repeating. The 2004 summer olympics would seem an ideal target for Al Quada. Not to mention Greece's home grown terrorists.

[Fester Chugabrew]

"What has been amazing about the war so far is not that we have been winning, but that we have been doing so — quite unlike our increasingly exhausted enemies — without the full mobilization of our vast economic, political, material, and human resources."

Don't forget to add the albatross of the left.

[Tolik]

Greece as a whole is one of the harshest US critics. They are definitely more sympathetic to the "poor oppressed freedom fighters" than others. I wonder how it translates to the freedom of movement for them within the country. It's interesting that terrorists did not avoid striking sympathizing countries (as we think would be a prudent thing to do): French tanker, Belgian consulate in Morocco, sitting on the fence before Bali Australia. The Greek security forces have quite a trouble on their hands.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

ping

[jordan8]

We are beginning the third year of this multi-theater conflict, and it resembles the Punic War after the Carthaginian defeat at the Metaurus in 207 B.C., the year of decision of 1863, or the autumn leading to Alamein and Stalingrad.
This article is a bit over the top, to say the least.

[WaterDragon]

Hanson is awesome as he puts the present war in the perspective of history!

[diotima]

Ping!

[Billthedrill]

And if there were another September 11, then all voluntary restrictions on the use of the full extent of American power will be off — and the response would be too terrible to contemplate.

Hanson has elsewhere made the point that democracies are among the easiest forms of government to influence and manipulate as long as it comes in a form short of killing violence. Once that threshold is crossed those peoples become unrecognizably violent and implacable until the issue is decided on the battlefield. One of the things that Old Europe is only now coming to recognize is that 9/11 has kicked the United States into that mode and that old methods of public disapproval and derision no longer evoke the apologetic response from Americans that they used to.

...Europeans loudly pronounced a new anti-Americanism and talked of a separate "German way"; Americans silently seethed and were resigned to give them their wish...

...And in that moral calculus, September 11 shocked an affluent and at times self-satisfied American citizenry into confessing that it was no longer either too wealthy, too refined, or too sensitive to kill killers.

The above two quotations I took from the stunning epilogue to Hanson's Ripples of Battle, a book I finished this morning on the bus and with which I am only now coming to terms. All of his books are fine pieces of scholarship; this one was no exception, but things were kicked into an entirely different plane when the epilogue, which details the implications, the "ripples," of 9/11 in the context developed in the other battles (Okinawa, Shilo, and Delium) in the book, sets forth in clear terms the reason for much of the disarray our European alignment seems to be finding itself. In Hanson's words, "the world...had suddenly cracked apart and would not be put back together with quite the same pieces."

I would strongly recommend this book for those who enjoy placing current events in the broad historical context and interpreting them through classical models. The book is worth the purchase price for the epilogue alone, IMHO.

[mercy]

BUMP

For brilliant intellectual content and TRUTH

[PogySailor]

Another outstanding VDH article.

[PogySailor]

I recommend "The Soul of Battle". A great read.