Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq, Yesterday and Today

The unexpected carnage of September 11 explains so much of our current situation. It has made the realist, neo-isolationist George Bush into an advocate for Wilsonianism abroad, but only on the calculation that the roots of Islamic fascism rested in the nexus between dictatorship and autocracy — the former destroys prosperity and freedom, and the latter makes use of terrorists to deflect rising popular dissatisfaction against the United States...The U.S. Senate and House voted for war in Iraq, not merely because they were deluded about the shared intelligence reports on WMD (though deluded they surely were), but also because of the 22 legitimate casus belli they added just in case. And despite the recent meae culpae, those charges remain as valid today as they were when they were approved: Saddam did try to kill a former American president; the U.N. embargo was violated, as were its inspection protocols; the 1991 accords were often ignored; the genocide of brave Kurds did happen; suicide bombers were being given bounties; terrorists, including those involved into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were given sanctuary by Saddam; and on and on...So it is not those charges, but we who leveled them, that have changed. Americans’ problem with the war is not that it was not moral, but that it has been deemed too costly for the perceived benefits that might accrue....Before Iraq, the assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark, Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 11/3/2006

Hanson, the magisterial historian from California, has written more thoughtfully on our intervention in the Middle East than almost any other writer. He writes from the perspective of a classics scholar as well, which gives a gravity to his work that two years at a journalism school and apprenticeship covering political beats at a regional newspaper can never provide. Don't miss this. Dazzled by MSM's fixation on bad news and ugly, sensational images, we have forgotten why we went, and possibly who we are.

Luther