Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
Posted on 11/24/2004 8:54:13 AM PST by quidnunc
One of the more curious aspects of the commentary on this war has not been the bias of the mainstream media but the cynical punditry that somehow ends up as the conventional wisdom among our New York and Washington elites. Here is a small sample of misplaced metaphors, allusions, and conventional wisdom of the last three years.
"You break it, you bought it" — so we were told ad nauseam throughout the war in Iraq. Bush and his Team America posse supposedly barged into an upscale store, rashly knocked over items, and now, quite startled, must stay on and pay the tab for the mess they made. How deep.
In truth, it was the wrong metaphor even before becoming hackneyed. The Pottery Barn image doesn't work for a variety of reasons. First, Saddam's Iraq was not a pristine, upscale shop. It was, rather, a trash heap of broken shards — its power, water, sewage, and garbage all fractured and scattered in pieces; its people both brutalized and often brutalizers as a result of three decades of institutionalized mass murder; its leadership a choice between Soviet-era killers and Dark Age jihadists.
Second, unlike the naïve buyer who takes umbrage that he must pay for something he inadvertently knocked over, we went into Iraq with the explicit intention of fixing things. Indeed, we announced quite openly that we did not want a repeat of Lebanon, Afghanistan of the 1980s, Mogadishu, or the first Gulf War, when we let the locals murder and bomb after we pulled out.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
FYI
Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
I apologize VDH am only halfway thru Ripples of Battle.
For millenia, the ultimate goal in war was to totally eradicate the enemy, or to leave them alone only when it was obvious that they would need many generations to again become a military threat.
Email him and ask him.
Maybe he'll address your question in his 'Response to Readership' column on VDH.com.
Wow, this is good. I wish we could put a 2-minute VDH rebuttal on every major newscast. As soon as Kevin Sites gets done with his negative, Cicken Little story, they have to cut to VDH, where he completely destroys every biased, defeatist assumption of the media.
Lets not forget "The Soul Of Battle"
FYI
The Last Best Killers on Earth
Listen
http://www.wbur.org/special/specialcoverage/archive_102601.asp
America is the last superpower standing, and it's not because we have an environmental advantage, and it's not because we are smarter or morally superior or have better high-tech toys. Military historian Victor Davis Hanson says that battle is the ultimate expression of our cultural values, and Western culture turns out the best killers on the planet. Will the West's knack for carnage win the War on Terrorism?
Guest: Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classics at California State University at Fresno, Author of "Culture and Carnage."
Have you read his "Mexifornia"?
From what I gather from the Hague Tribunal in progress, Milosevic did no such thing.
the now-freed peoples of France, Germany, Japan, Eastern Europe, Korea, the Balkans, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, and Iraq owe a great deal to thousands of dead Americans
From what I understand, no Americans got killed in the Balkans, and no one was freed. To the contrary, the Caliphate(s) expanded to include a third of Bosnia and all of Kosovo. The Albanian Islamists movement was a per cursor of what is now going on in Holland, France, Germany and Spain. How can Victor miss this?
What a joy to read his essays!
Thanks for the ping, Tolik.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
National security, arrived at on a case-by-case basis.
In the case of Iraq (and Afghanistan), the purpose is to defeat radical Islamism by giving the Arab culture an alternative -- democratic government and free institutions. That is the ideological component of the War on Terror.
In the case of Germany at the end of WW II, it stemmed from the Marshall Plan, which was designed to do two things:
a. Rebuild the economy of Western Europe, in the face of a rising Soviet threat. It would not have served our security to see Europe fall under the Soviet aegis.
b. Maintain employment by and the productivity of our own economy. The war ended with a huge industrial machine having been constructed, much of which was no longer needed for domestic purposes. Plus, there was a huge demobilizing military ready to rejoin the work force. Rebuilding other economies served to keep our economy working and opened new markets for American industry -- and a healthy economy is an important aspect of national security.
I started it, but got sidetracked by other books. From the reviews I've read it sounds really good. The problem I have is there are so many good books to read and things to learn and only 24 hrs. in a day.
I understand Victor is writing a book about the Peloponnesian War.
There's another one. We used to plan on killing the enemy, but decided that wounding him would cripple the other side even more since they would have to devote manpower to treating the wounded, protecting him, and then evacuating him from the battlefield. So where are we now? Now we wound the enemy and he is our responsibility to treat, defend, and evacuate -- all the while sucking up manpower that could be used to better effect on the battlefield to kill the enemy. What the hell happened? And when did it happen?
btt
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