Not so short Victor Davis Hanson : but various and sundry snark, quibbles and rebuttals
In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.
Go! White hats! Go!
But above all, the American people need to be reminded there was no oil, no hegemony, no money, no Israel, and no profit involved in this effort, but something far greater and more lasting.
roflmao!!!
The key to Iraq is enfeebling those around it who are weakening the country — namely Syria and Iran. The U.S. should be calling for democratic reform in both countries — constantly, without interruption…
Wait! haven’t we been doing that since, er, I don’t know, like 2000?
…given Iran’s conventional military impotence”
When they block the whole of
Syria’s government is little more than Murder, Inc.
You mean like Merica? No way!
We should remind the world that our 2,000th fatality did not end our commitment to freedom and justice, but reminded us just how much we owe our dead so that their ultimate sacrifice was not in vain.
Ok, I almost threw up on that one… aMERiCA: Where we kill people who have killed people to show other killers that killing people is WRONG!
George Bush also should begin addressing his most venomous critics at home, by condemning their current extremism. He must explain to the nation how a radical, vicious Left has more or less gotten a free pass in its rhetoric of hate, and has now passed the limits of accepted debate.
Hooverism? didn’t we try that once?
All of these issues are interrelated. If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play.
ba ba ba! have you any wool?
…reach out to the Democratic Senate..”
you mean ‘republican lite’?
The American people, both pro and con, are more than ready for a great debate to settle these issues one way or another.
you betcha!
Maybe it’s just to late for a snark turgid verse and puffed reps, I’d like to get all “dice clay” on him, but I just can’t muster it..

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 31 2005 9:21 utc | 3

Since Hanson is allegedly a classical scholar, he knows that the original crossing of the Rubicon led to civil war and empire. (Bush himself wouldn’t fare too well in this analogy, but I guess Hanson is counting on Bush’s ignorance.)
Hanson never did get around to explaining what Bush should do about “politicized indictments.” Does he want the president to disband the judiciary?

Posted by: Vin Carreo | Oct 31 2005 9:58 utc | 5

Who reads these idiotic pieces (other than amused liberals)?
The ‘Base’…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 31 2005 10:40 utc | 7

Who reads these idiotic pieces (other than amused liberals)?
The ‘Base’…

Nah They’re not illustrated and they don’t contain references to chapters and verses so a bloke knows which bits are god’s word.
No one actually reads them but people do buy them I think we know the type of person that buys them.
Someone who needs to convince himself along with the rest of the world that he’s ‘made it’ materially.
Rich people are republicans. Ergo if I am a republican, I must be rich.
Those most tiresome, frustating, and thick as two short planks stupid, people on the face of the earth.
They aren’t rich. They are struggling like everyone else.
The reason they aren’t rich is because they can’t see the plain truth which is yes a big mob of rich people do vote republican/conservative. They vote that way because the repugs do things that make rich peoples lives better. They don’t vote repug cause it makes their heart ring proud just to see Mr Bush standing steadfast and true.
However everything the repugs do isn’t gonna do a damn thing for Shawn. His real interests (ie good public education, a state managed healthcare system and affordable housing, all funded by making the people who are actually rich pay their share) will never be met by repugs.
The only need he gets met is shaking the sweaty hand of the bloke who turned his old neighborhood into a war zone before buying it up for sweet F A and gentrifying it. Yep the old family home does look great now, he can’t help but admire it as he drives past it on his two hourly commute in from cardboard condo land.
Still that guy in National Review sure knows his stuff, Shawn will get to read it one time when he’s not working, driving to work, working at the other job and driving from the other job to pick up the kids cause Lissa has to stay back late tonight.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 31 2005 12:10 utc | 9

Amen, Deb is Dead.

Posted by: Dena | Oct 31 2005 13:57 utc | 11

Hanson is praising the United States of America’s Military Accomplishments (USAMA for short) when our thoughts should be turned towards disengaging and handing control to the Iraqi military and police.
But where are they? Deserting faster than we can train them, save for a few who stick around to pass inside information to the insurgents. The only thing they are good at is running off with the millions we send them in aid.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 31 2005 17:46 utc | 13

I’d be scared to let that one into bedlam.

Posted by: Groucho | Oct 31 2005 18:17 utc | 15

pat
empires come & empires go
& each one of them
happily slaughters their own soldiers
what we have here, though are ideologues, men mostly, who seem to get a hard on thinking & celebrating the sacrifice of others when they themselves have bever sacrificed – not only in war but also in relation to civic duty they will not engage in unless it is profitable or can be turned to their advantage

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 31 2005 19:25 utc | 17

From Sam Knight in The Times UK 9/28:

According to The Washington Post, Mr Libby, like Mr Cheney, “greatly admires the work of Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian who posits that warfare is an inevitable part of civilization, evil is a basic condition of humanity, and tyrants must be confronted by the harshest possible means.”

Posted by: jonku | Oct 31 2005 23:56 utc | 19

Sorry, the Times article above was October 28, not “9/28.”
A few more excerpts about Libby:

Taught at Yale by Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank and an architect of neo-conservative foreign policy, Mr Libby began his career in public service at the State Department in 1981, where he worked as a policy adviser with a special focus on East Asia and the Pacific.
…
As well as serving as Mr Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Mr Libby is [was] President Bush’s top foreign policy adviser.

Makes you wonder why Billmon is focusing on Hanson 🙂

Posted by: jonku | Nov 1 2005 0:41 utc | 21

Mission Accomplished
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/USfatalities.gif
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/CPIENGNS_5yrs.png
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/OILPRICE_5yrs.png
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/DGS1MO_Max.png
http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/c/5y/_/_dji
The chart for West Texas Crude is starting
to look an awful lot like the chart of US
war dead in Iraq, which is starting to look
a lot like the chart for the DJIA, pre-2000.
Only this time, there no limit on ‘upside’,
and the only correction is *get out of Iraq*.

Posted by: tante aime | Nov 1 2005 3:08 utc | 23

“what we have here, though are ideologues, men mostly, who seem to get a hard on thinking & celebrating the sacrifice of others when they themselves have bever sacrificed – not only in war but also in relation to civic duty they will not engage in unless it is profitable or can be turned to their advantage”
Oh, I’m quite certain that guys like Hanson feel that they are carrying out a civic duty, doing just what they’re doing. How can they feel otherwise?
Empires come and empires go, and ours cannot go fast enough.

Posted by: Pat | Nov 1 2005 4:47 utc | 25

@Pat
Strength, faith, hope, Pat.

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
– Francois Fenelon
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
– Voltaire
If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
– Joan Baez

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 1 2005 5:41 utc | 27

Debunking Neocon Myths on World War II
Myth: The Allies let the Germans off easy with their armistice in November 1918 – they should have gone on to Berlin.
Fact: The armistice in 1918 was an unconditional surrender in everything but name. The reason the Allies didn’t occupy Germany was because not even the most hawkish of Allied politicians wanted to occupy Germany. The only difference a “formal” unconditional surrender in 1918 would have meant would have been an Allied victory parade through Berlin.
Myth: Neville Chamberlain was a coward who had no legitimate reason not to go to war with Hitler over the Sudetenland.
Fact: There were excellent reasons not to go to war in 1938:
1. All of Hitler’s territorial claims up to and including the Sudetenland were of territories full of Germans (and which thus wanted to be ruled by Hitler). This meant that according to Wilsonian self-determination Hitler was in the right, making it very difficult to mobilize public opinion against him. If Hitler won on the continent (ie conquered France), British morale would have been much more likely to crack than it was historically in 1940 (where the British knew what kind of gangster Hitler was, having seen him tear up the Munich Agreement only six months after signing it).
2. The Allies had won a total victory against Germany in World War I, but had completely failed to actually do anything with this victory, and were in a worse strategic situation in 1938 than they were in 1914. Any Anglo-French victory before the fall of Poland would simply turn the clock back to 1919. Germany would still be disgruntled, and would probably be thinking “maybe third time lucky…”
3. If Britain and France had defeated Germany after the fall of Poland, Poland and Eastern Germany would have wound up under Soviet occupation (once Poland was gone, Stalin could not allow peace between the Western Allies and an intact Germany, for fear of a Anglo-French-German grand coalition against him). This was bad enough historically in 1945, but in the late 1930 it would have been far worse – the United States (still isolationist) has no presence in Europe, and the atomic bomb was still years away.
The war against Germany would have been a mere prelude to the real “World War II” between the Western Allies and the Soviets. The Western Allies, even if victorious, would have suffered far heavier casualties than they did historically (where all the biggest bloodbaths were on the German/Russian front and thus did not involve the democracies).
Myth: The occupation of Germany in 1945 ensured that the 1945 peace succeeded where the 1919 peace had failed.
Fact: The Confederacy in 1865 was totally defeated and occupied like Germany in 1945, but Radical Reconstruction still failed. The real reason why the 1945 peace stuck was because World War II morphed into the Cold War with no real break in between. If the Germans had turned against the Anglo-Americans, they would have been throwing themselves into Stalin’s jaws. In 1919 by contrast the Western Allies were Germany’s only enemy.
(For a Civil War analog, imagine Haiti ruled the whole Caribbean, and fought in the Civil War on the Union side – and in fact bore the brunt of the war against the Confederacy. In the aftermath of this alternate Civil War Radical Reconstruction would have worked fine, as the white Southerners would have been too terrified of being thrown to the Haitian wolves to resist.)

Posted by: George Carty | Nov 1 2005 17:58 utc | 29