Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
New Link! http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
Angry Reader
Editor's Note: In this section we entertain letters from the critics. Some readers are angry, some are not so angry, and others merely frustrated.December 8, 2006Mr. Hanson, have you ever written anything positive about Muslims or Islam, or is it always going to be Israel and the U.S. right, Islam always wrong?
Hanson: How odd to suggest that when the now demonized policy, which I supported, of staying on after the removal of Saddam Hussein to allow elections for the Iraqis was most certainly based on the utopian idea that Muslims themselves were quite capable of consensual government as we see in Turkey or Indonesia.
So it is up to Arab Muslims to prove that ideal was also true of the Arab Middle East, and show that Palestine and Iraq can stabilize and conduct democracy under the rule of law.
Another piece of advise to you, as a moderate Muslim in the West: the present U.S. policy was about as good as the Middle East was going to get, this engagement that saw billions spent in Afghanistan and Iraq for democracy, and real American pressure exerted on behalf on the people of Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf States to have a say in their governments.
So we are at a great crossroads: when the world's only superpower puts its money and lives behind the idea of consensual government for Arab Muslims, will they tweak and fidget about the infidel's hubris, or use the opening for their own purposes of reform?
And a word of warning as well: if Iraq should fail, and if there should be another 9/11 traced to a terrorist-sponsoring Arab nation, and celebrated once more by the proverbial Arab Street, then for the next half century the United States will write off all notion of reform and liberalization and just deal, as we see with the return of the realists, with the Middle East as it is. And that means tough, obliterating retaliatory strikes to each terrorist provocation, without much concern for illiberal conditions on the ground that so enhance the opportunistic terrorists. It is the Muslim world's call, not ours.
I enjoy reading VDH... wish he would fix/improve his "private papers" website.