Victor Davis Hanson

If you don't know about him, here's a little info. He's a military historian who teaches Classics at a Cal State campus, could do better, but lives and works a farm where he was born and which has been in the family for generations. I think his latest book is "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power", although another one "An Autumn of War" is also very recent. That latter is a collection of columns he wrote in the year just after 9/11, most of them appeared in the National Review Online, where he has a bi-weekly column. (Archive at http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp ) Robert Kaplan calles Hanson "a national scholarly resource", Donald Kagan says he's "a national treasure". The guy is good. I was going to pull some quotes from "Autumn", but there are just too many. Here are a few:

(1) There may be four or five words for various types of female veils in the languages of the Middle East - burqa, chador, niqab, hyab, and others - but no indigenous vocabulary for constitutional and consensual government.

(2) The real lesson of the Gulf War was not merely that coalitions were critical to our success, but equally that by bringing aboard an assortment of dubious allies that were not critical for victory, we failed to go to Baghdad - and made no demands for Kuwait's medieval and cowardly government-in-exile to promise its citizens the eventual hope of consensual government.

(3) The key ingredient for successful conclusion of wars being humiliation coupled with mercy; a true end to hostilities is not possible without both...Saddam Hussein thought he had survived the world's armada, and so defined the Gulf War as success, not defeat. The unbiased touchstone of success - Baghdad not stormed, Hussein's head not in a noose, and the Imperial Guard not liquidated - suggested that he, not we, knew better. And so, like Churchill in 1939, we now face the same enemy in the same place because of naivete and the misplaced humanity of the past.

(4) Everywhere at the millennium, the human community agrees that facism, theocracy, Communism, tribalism, statism, and fundamentalism lead nowhere but to misery - everywhere, that is, except the Islamic world of the Middle East.

(5) Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation's culture - not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves - that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that its own fundamental way of doing business - not the Jews - makes it poor, sick, and weak.

I could go on all night... Carnage and Culture is just out in paperback, got it and can't wait to start reading.

Byron