The Victor Davis Hanson Thread

[squealiox]

I believe that's called genocide, and is generally what we fight against. I recall the Germans trying it a few decades back... Mixed results. I'm not entirely sure that killing all Iraqis to save them from Saddam or Islamists quite makes sense.

er, just for the record, i'm not advocating that. just pointing out that world powers in classical times (and more recently too, of course) saw it as an option, but modern democracies do not.

 

[a_majoor]

A War Like No Other
by Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.jsharf.com/bookReviews/index.php?bookId=23
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?endeca=1&cds2Pid=164&isbn=1400060958

Why do we still care about the Peloponnesian War, 2500 years after it ended? Because it became the prototype war for death struggles between ideologies. With the possible exception of the Punic Wars, the Roman wars of conquest were primarily political and personal matters, only incidentally spreading the idea of Roman Law. By the time of the Empire, the Romans were more civilized, but hardly more idealistic than their enemies.

It's also the best-documented ancient war. Along with Thucidydes's and Xenophon's contemporaneous accounts, the 4th-Century Athenians never stopped writing about its effects on their society and culture. Numerous classical historians have written accounts of the war, as well. After Troy and the Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War was the beginning of western classical education (which meant basic education until Dewey).

So what need of A War Like No Other, especially on the heels of Donald Kagan's seminal four-volume history, and it's one-volume condensation meant for the likes of me?

Victor Davis Hanson offers a different way of telling the same story, describing not who fought where and when, but how they fought. what weapons they used, what grand strategies and battlefield tactics they conceived, and how Greek society both affected and was changed by those decisions. By breaking down the war into phases, and by describing how the war was fought, Hanson produces a more coherent narrative than his strictly chronological predecessors.

Both sides started the war with faulty strategies based on faulty assumptions. The Spartans believed they could starve out Athens, as they had so many other adversaries. The Athenians believed they could force an end to the war through stalemate.

In fact, the two main parties barely confronted each other at all at first. The Athenians had more sense than to confront the Spartans in open land combat, while the Athenians were invincible on the seas. So both sides found themselves using heretofore unthinkable tactics, targeting civilians, executing opposing generals, massacring defeated enemies. By then end of the first phase of the war in 421, a stalemate had been achieved, and a truce signed. But neither side really believed the underlying causes of the war had been resolved, and both believed the fighting would start again.

Moreover, both sides had hardened. The Athenians had been ravaged by a plague (brought on by overcrowded conditions and having been born before Ignatz Semmelweiss), while the Spartans felt continually threatened by Athenian on the Peloponnesian homeland, which encouraged their slaves to defect or plot revolt. (Slave labor was the linchpin of Spartan society, with actual Spartan warriors comprising only a tiny fraction of the population of Sparta and its allies.)

Eventually, as the Athenians missed opportunities and failed to press home their advantage, the Spartans were able to find Persian support, and neutralize the main Athenian advantage: money. By the end of the war, the Athenians were completely on the defensive, needing to maintain an qualitative advantage in every sea battle. When their luck finally ran out, Lysander sailed right up to the defenseless Piraeus, and the game was over.

Hanson is a fine writer. He has perfect pitch in his writing, and is always able to properly calibrate the level of detail, answering questions while not drowning us in irrelevancy. He also has an eye for the advantages and resiliency of democracies at war. while unblinkingly facing the burdens they fight under as well.

The intentional irony of the title is that while the War was a new thing indeed for the 5th-Century Greeks fighting it, we look for parallels in every Western war fought since, down to today: the American Civil, in the North's attack on the South's economic base and its slavery; World War I, as a civilizational civil war that was longer and more destructive than its recent predecessors (and which neither side knew how to win); the Cold War, in its length and ideological content; the War on Radical Islam, with its lack of a fixed front.

Twenty-five hundred years after the Long Walls came down, we still do have something to learn from this war.

 

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The cultural imperatives that drive war havn't changed much over recorded history, as VDH shows. This is also a good way to look at the real imperatives of CF Transformation,

In other words, the newfound lethality of the Macedonian phalanx did not change at all the older rules of why men fight, the ingredients for their success or failure, or how such new technology was rightly or wrongly employed in an unchanging strategic landscape.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson043006.html

Passions: A Primordial Landscape
Comment on Colin S. Gray's military history arguments for the Historical Society
by Victor Davis Hanson
Historically Speaking

As a long admirer of Thucydides I must plead guilty to agreeing with almost all of the sensible points that Colin S. Gray has made.

Not long ago in the inaugural issue of The New Atlantis (Spring 2003) I wrote a brief article entitled, “Military Technology and American Culture” that addressed, in the immediate aftermath of the three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, similar misplaced giddiness about the new technology and its role in the perceived “revolution” in war:

    The most dangerous tendency of military planners is the arrogant belief that all of war’s age-old rules and characteristics are rendered obsolete under the mind-boggling technological advances or social revolutions of the present. Tactics alter, and the respective roles of defense and offense each enter long periods of superiority vis-à-vis each other. The acceptance of casualties is predicated on domestic levels of affluence and leisure. But ultimately the rules of war and culture, like water, stay the same — even as their forms and their pumps change.

So I find very little in Gray’s essay that I could argue with, inasmuch as he hits on themes of unchanging human nature that sober thinkers such as Angelo Codevilla, Michael Howard, and Donald Kagan have reiterated in warning us about believing that war reinvents itself ex nihilo each generation.

Even the Macedonian sarissas that Gray alludes to in passing are instructive. They did entail a change in tactics (two hands were now required to hold such a long pike, requiring the mostly mercenary phalangites to jettison the old protection of the large hoplite shield held with the left hand), as the phalanx achieved greater killing power (five rows of spear tips, not three, hit the enemy in the initial crash). The sarissa–phalanx’s resulting clumsiness necessitated a symphony of forces, as Philip and Alexander protected such an unwieldy mass with light and heavy cavalry, the hypaspists, and missile and light-armed troops. Nevertheless, for the men asked to fight, victory was still achieved or lost by the degree of discipline and élan in the ranks, the acumen of their generals who sought out favorable terrain, and the larger political objectives that such forces were used for. In other words, the newfound lethality of the Macedonian phalanx did not change at all the older rules of why men fight, the ingredients for their success or failure, or how such new technology was rightly or wrongly employed in an unchanging strategic landscape.

All of the valuable examples Gray cites from the 19th to 20th century to refute the notion of a radical, technologically-based revolution in the essence of warfare could find earlier antecedents from ancient and medieval times. Catapults were lamented in reactionary literature of the 4th-century B.C. for destroying the old hoplite code predicated on battle courage. But by the century’s end stouter walls, new styles of construction, and counter-artillery mounted on the walls had neutralized even torsion catapults, and relegated them to a mere cycle in the age-old tension between the besieger and the besieged.

15th-century fiery weapons, it is true, soon empowered the offense and eventually made iron, steel, and bronze body plate obsolete. Yet in an age of Kevlar and new ceramics that can stop many bullets, we are relearning not only the age-old science of crafting personal armor, but the reasons why such protection is needed when the training and costs of specialist warriors simply make them too expensive to lose. In that sense, Gray is absolutely correct to note: “We do not care about many of the details of warfare’s changing character through two and a half millennia. What we care about is the unchanging nature of war.”

In this age of materialist thinking, Gray makes an even better point. He quotes Thucydides’s famous “fear, honor, and interest” as motivations for war, invoked by the Athenians as the primary reasons that they acquired and kept an empire (1.75.) The Spartans, Thucydides also says, started the Peloponnesian War out of “fear” (phobos) of the growth of Athenian power — since it is hard, despite the many pretexts, to cite any real legitimate grievance against the Athenians who had pretty much kept to the understandings of the existing peace accords. In general, the powder kegs for most wars in the ancient Greek world were ostensibly marginal border lands, territory of little real economic value but of enormous psychological importance to the perceived collective worth of neighboring agrarian communities.

We constantly need to be reminded of the often frightening passions of our primordial brains. After September 11 many thought that Osama bin Laden’s earlier fatwas, alleging various grievances — from American troops in Saudi Arabia to the UN oil-for-food embargo of Iraq — were serious writs, rather than mere pretexts (Thucydidean prophases) for deep-seated anger and humiliation brought on by a globalized and Western culture that really did threaten all the old hierarchies of an increasingly non-competitive Muslim world and the worried mullahs, patriarchs, and theocrats who found past privilege and honor in them. And believing that Osama and his suicide bombers represented some entirely unprecedented existential threat was also as invalid as assuming our cruise missiles or GPS-guided bombs at last offered a lasting antidote to terrorism. In other words, Osama bin Laden probably went to war over a sense of lost honor, in fear of Western globalization, and due to his perceived interest in thinking — given perceptions of relative Western appeasement of radical Islamicist terrorism since 1979 — that he could win more than he might lose. And neither his brand of terrorism or the many antidotes to it were especially novel in the tactical or strategic sense, despite the new technology of miniaturization that allows deadly weapons to be carried on a single person, and the computerized-guided weapons that we often use to strike back at terrorist hideouts a half-a-world away.

My only slight modification of Gray’s sensible comments is in regard to his apparent impression that most in the armed forces do not believe as he. Yet I do not think that the defense establishment in toto is quite yet in thrall to the presentism and enslaved by its technological pizzazz. Thucydides and Clausewitz are required reading in many courses at the war colleges and academies, and scores of Defense Department strategic analyses start with the Greeks and Romans. Those with whom I have talked to people at the Pentagon and in the military are very aware that they are hardly exempt from war’s timeless nature simply by reason of their newfangled weaponry, but instead still players in an ancestral deadly game whose age-old truths they must master or perish.

But in general, to believe that Gray is incorrect would be to assume that human nature itself is malleable and that people now act differently than they did in the past — either due to some accelerated evolutionary process that has changed our very brain chemistry since the advent of recorded history or because the use of computers and advanced electronic circuitry alters in some organic fashion the very function of the human brain and its attendant emotions. Thus we would need a new history of a new species to find general truths from the past to guide the future or assume history is bunk because humans alter their genetic make-up and accustomed behavior almost yearly.

In contrast, the extent to which there is real ethical or material progress in human history hinges not merely on technology or new methods of thinking, as much as on understanding timeless human nature, and the plethora of examples from history that can guide us, mutatis mutandis, from making the same general mistakes in the present.

My worry, in fact, is not so much with our armed forces and military theorists—who often seem to recognize that the face of war may change, but not its essence—as with many of our institutions that ultimately guide and shape civic society.

The general credo, for example, of current Peace and Conflict Resolution Theory programs in American universities is that classical notions of deterrence no longer apply, since either education or evolution can change the nature of man and substitute Enlightenment principles of education and dialogue for the use of credible defenses against primordial enemies. In a recent debate with the Peace Studies director at Dartmouth College, I was struck by a comment by Professor Ronald Edsforth, who insisted: “Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact. It didn’t stop back in ancient times . . . . We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.” (The Dartmouth Review February 11, 2005).

The problem Gray so ably recognizes may not be that mere defense theorists, generals, and national security advisors are convinced that their new weaponry has invented the world anew. Instead the real worry is that a much larger cast of therapists believes that our dazzling modernity—either by reason of its technology or the evolved humans who created it—is no longer guided by the lessons of the past.

And that is a frightening thought indeed.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

The last part about "many of our institutions that ultimately guide and shape civic society" is indeed frightening, since in Canada, a lot people attempt to use the CF as a sort of social laboratory to experiment on our young men and women, without stopping to consider the nature and  purpose of the Armed Forces. Thankfully, the evidence to date seems to show  the CF as an institution is robust enough to shoulder these changes and still be a combat effective force. This probably has more to do with the deep institutional and social roots of the Armed Forces (going back to the British parentage of the various services; the prototype of the current Regimental system can be seen in Oliver Cromwell's "New Model Army", and the Royal Navy's institutional roots go back to Hawkins and Drake fighting against the Spanish Armada even earlier) than any other factor.

 

[a_majoor]

VDH offers prescriptions for American Foreign policy in the future. The quick summary: "look more to our own interests, rather than try to please anyone else".

http://article.nationalreview.com/

Anti-Anti-Americanism
Dealing with the crazy world after Iraq.

By Victor Davis Hanson


How does the United States deal with a corrupt world in which we are blamed even for the good we do, while others are praised when they do wrong or remain indifferent to suffering?

We are accused of unilateral and preemptory bullying of the madman Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose reactors that will be used to “wipe out” the “one-bomb” state of Israel were supplied by Swiss, German, and Russian profit-minded businessmen. No one thinks to chastise those who sold Iran the capability of destroying Israel.

Here in the United States we worry whether we are tough enough with the Gulf sheikdoms in promoting human rights and democratic reform. Meanwhile China simply offers them cash for oil, no questions asked. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez pose as anti-Western zealots to Western naifs. The one has never held an election; the other tries his best to end the democracy that brought him to power. Meanwhile our fretting elites, back from Europe or South America, write ever more books on why George Bush and the Americans are not liked.

Hamas screams that we are mean for our logical suggestion that free American taxpayers will not subsidize such killers and terrorists. Those in the Middle East whine about Islamophobia, but keep silent that there is not allowed a Sunni mosque in Iran or a Christian church in Saudi Arabia. An entire book could be written about the imams and theocrats—in Iran, Egypt, the West Bank, Pakistan, and the Gulf States—who in safety issue fatwas and death pronouncements against Americans in Iraq and any who deal with the “infidel,” and yet send their spoiled children to private schools in Britain and the United States, paid for by their own blackmail money from corrupt governments.

You get the overall roundup: the Europeans have simply absorbed as their own the key elements of ossified French foreign policy—utopian rhetoric and anti-Americanism can pretty much give you a global pass to sell anything you wish to anyone at anytime.

China is more savvy. It discards every disastrous economic policy Mao ever enacted, but keeps two cornerstones of Maoist dogma: imply force to bully, and keep the veneer of revolutionary egalitarianism to mask cutthroat capitalism and diplomacy, from copyright theft and intellectual piracy to smiling at rogue clients like North Korea and disputing the territorial claims of almost every neighbor in sight.

Oil cuts a lot of idealism in the Middle East. The cynicism is summed up simply as “Those who sell lecture, and those who buy listen.” American efforts in Iraq—the largest aid program since the Marshall Plan, where American blood and treasure go to birth democracy—are libeled as “no blood for oil.” Yet a profiteering Saudi Arabia or Kuwait does more to impoverish poor oil-importing African and Asian nations than any regime on earth. But this sick, corrupt world keeps mum.

And why not ask Saudi Arabia about its now lionized and well-off al-Ghamdi clan? Aside from the various Ghamdi terrorists and bin-Laden hangers-on, remember young Ahmad, the 20-year-old medical student who packed his suicide vest with ball bearings and headed for Mosul, where he blew up 18 Americans? Or how about dear Ahmad and Hamza, the Ghamdis who helped crash Flight 175 into the South Tower on September 11? And please do not forget either the Saudi icon Said Ghamdi, who, had he not met Todd Beamer and Co. on Flight 93, would have incinerated the White House or the Capitol.

So we know the symptoms of this one-sided anti-Americanism and its strange combination of hatred, envy, and yearning—but, so far, not its remedy. In the meantime, the global caricature of the United States, in the aftermath of Iraq, is proving near fatal to the Bush administration, whose idealism and sharp break with past cynical realpolitik have earned it outright disdain. Indeed, the more al Qaeda is scattered, and the more Iraq looks like it will eventually emerge as a constitutional government, the angrier the world seems to become at the United States. American success, it seems, is even worse than failure.

Some of the criticism is inevitable. America is in an unpopular reconstruction of Iraq that has cost lives and treasure. Observers looked only at the explosions, never what the sacrifice was for—especially when it is rare for an Afghan or Iraqi ever to visit the United States to express thanks for giving their peoples a reprieve from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

We should also accept that the United States, as the world’s policeman, always suffers the easy hatred of the cops, who are as ankle-bitten when things are calm as they are desperately sought when danger looms. America is the genitor and largest donor to the United Nations. Its military is the ultimate guarantor of free commerce by land and sea, and its wide-open market proves the catalyst of international trade. More immigrants seek its shores than all other designations combined—especially from countries of Latin America, whose criticism of the United States is the loudest.

Nevertheless, while we cannot stop anti-Americanism, here (a consequence, in part, of a deep-seeded, irrational sense of inferiority) and abroad, we can adopt a wiser stance that puts the onus of responsibility more on our critics.

We have a window of 1 to 3 years in Iran before it deploys nuclear weapons. Let Ahmadinejad talk and write—the loonier and longer, the better, as we smile and ignore him and his monstrous ilk.

Let also the Europeans and Arabs come to us to ask our help, as sphinx-like we express “concern” for their security needs. Meanwhile we should continue to try to appeal to Iranian dissidents, stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and resolve that at the eleventh hour this nut with his head in a well will not obtain the methods to destroy what we once knew as the West.

Ditto with Hamas. Don’t demonize it—just don’t give it any money. Praise democracy, but not what was elected.

We should curtail money to Mr. Mubarak as well. No need for any more sermons on democracy—been there, done that. Now we should accept with quiet resignation that if an aggregate $50 billion in give-aways have earned us the most anti-American voices in the Middle East, then a big fat zero for Egypt might be an improvement. After all, there must be something wrong with a country that gave us both Mohammad Atta and Dr. Zawahiri.

The international Left loves to champion humanitarian causes that do not involve the immediate security needs of the United States, damning us for inaction even as they are the first to slander us for being military interventionists. We know the script of Haiti, Mogadishu, and the Balkans, where Americans are invited in, and then harped at both for using and not using force. Where successful, the credit goes elsewhere; failure is always ours alone. Still, we should organize multinational efforts to save those in Darfur—but only after privately insisting that every American soldier must be matched by a European, Chinese, and Russian peacekeeper.

There are other ways to curb our exposure to irrational hatred that seems so to demoralize the American public. First, we should cease our Olympian indifference to hypocrisy, instead pointing out politely inconsistencies in European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese morality. Why not express more concern about the inexplicable death of Balkan kingpin prisoners at The Hague or European sales of nuclear technology to madmen or institutionalized Chinese theft of intellectual property?

We need to reexamine the nature of our overseas American bases, elevating the political to the strategic, which, it turns out, are inseparable after all. To take one small example: When Greeks pour out on their streets to rage at a visiting American secretary of State, we should ask ourselves, do we really need a base in Crete that is so costly in rent and yet ensures Greeks security without responsibility or maturity? Surely once we leave, those brave opportunistic souls in the streets of Athens can talk peace with the newly Islamist Turkish government, solve Cyprus on their own, or fend off terrorists from across the Mediterranean.

The point is not to be gratuitously punitive or devolve into isolationism, but to continue to apply to Europe the model that was so successful in the Philippines and now South Korea—ongoing redeployment of Americans to where we can still strike in emergencies, but without empowering hypocritical hosts in time of peace.

We must also sound in international fora as friendly and cooperative as possible with the Russians, Chinese, and the lunatic Latin American populists—even as we firm up our contingency plans and strengthen military ties of convenience with concerned states like Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil.

The United States must control our borders, for reasons that transcend even terrorism and national security. One way to cool the populist hatred emanating from Latin America is to ensure that it becomes a privilege, not a birthright, to enter the United States. In traveling the Middle East, I notice the greatest private complaint is not Israel or even Iraq, but the inability to enter the United States as freely as in the past. And that, oddly, is not necessarily a bad thing, as those who damn us are slowly learning that their cheap hatred has had real consequences.

Then there is, of course, oil. It is the great distorter, one that punishes the hard-working poor states who need fuel to power their reforming economies while rewarding failed regimes for their mischief, by the simple accident that someone else discovered it, developed it, and then must purchase it from under their dictatorial feet. We must drill, conserve, invent, and substitute our way out of this crisis to ensure the integrity of our foreign policy, to stop the subsidy of crazies like Chavez and Ahmadinejad, and to lower the world price of petroleum that taxes those who can least afford it. There is a reason, after all, why the al-Ghamdis are popular icons in Saudi Arabia rather than on the receiving end of a cruise missile.

So we need more firm explanation, less loud assertion, more quiet with our enemies, more lectures to neutrals and friends—and always the very subtle message that cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences.


— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

 

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VDH summarizes 2008:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/25/EDGL14UQOL.DTL

2008 - Our 'that was then, this is now' year

Victor Davis Hanson, Tribune Media Services

Friday, December 26, 2008

As 2008 comes to a close, almost nothing has turned out as was expected at the beginning of the year - whether we consider oil prices, the war in Iraq, political corruption or the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Oil

For much of the year, the price of oil skyrocketed; by July, it had reached $147 a barrel. Petroleum prophets warned us that it would soon top $200 - and that we should brace for a future of permanently scarce energy. Geostrategists added that cash-flush petrol states like Iran, Russia and Venezuela would cause global mischief for decades to come.

Then oil crashed with the stock market in September. Even the infamous cartel tactics of OPEC haven't restored energy prices. The money we're saving could translate into a nearly half-trillion-dollar annual stimulus package for the U.S. economy - and the near-bankruptcy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin.

So, the year ends with politicians contemplating new energy taxes - and how to raise free-falling gas prices enough to encourage alternate fuels in a world flush with excess cheap oil.

Iraq

2008 opened with presidential candidates blaming each other about Iraq, declaring that the surge had not brought more stability, and accepting the recommendations of a staged withdrawal offered by the Iraq Study Group.

Yet, we ended the year with applause for Gen. David Petraeus - and an admission that his surge and a change in tactics have brought increased security to Iraq. As of this writing, five American soldiers so far have been killed this month in Iraq; more Americans are often slain in a single day on the streets of major American cities.

Politics

The Democrats promised an end to the "culture of corruption" of congressional Republicans. Then human nature in 2008 proved more reliable than promises of reform politics.

So we ended the year with a surge of Democratic malfeasance that easily matched the former Republican Congress. Crusading New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace after disclosure of his junkets with a prostitute. "Hot Rod" Blagojevich, governor of Illinois, was caught on a wire discussing how to sell President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder.

Then there's Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The sheer range of his alleged transgressions is shocking: occupying four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem (while also claiming a tax exemption on a D.C. residence), giving multimillion-dollar tax breaks to an energy company in exchange for donations, failing to report rental income to the IRS, and abusing congressional perks.

And Democratic Reps. Tim Mahoney, of Florida, and William Jefferson, of Louisiana, proved every bit as repugnant as the Republican cheats Sen. Ted Stevens, of Alaska, and Rep. Duke Cunningham, of California.

The economy

The year began with wheeler-dealers in a bull Wall Street market strutting about with near-obscene megabonuses of tens of millions of dollars.

Then all hell broke loose when American finance collapsed in September - and trillions of dollars worth of personal stocks and 401(k) retirement accounts simply went up in smoke.

By the end of this year, the meltdown had proved an equal opportunity morality tale. Conservatives cited Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and Citibank senior adviser Robert Rubin as emblematic of the rotten nexus between stock and mortgage fraud, big campaign donations and poor government oversight.

Liberals wondered why big shots like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had been CEO of Goldman-Sachs, and free marketers, from Richard Fuld at Lehman Brothers to the Big Three auto heads, once took hundreds of millions for themselves while their companies headed toward insolvency.

We end this weird "that was then, this is now" year with President-elect Obama himself, the former avatar of liberal hope and change, recruiting some of his Cabinet from Bill Clinton's former team and seeming to embrace much of President Bush's foreign policy.

Imagine the election chances of a candidate Obama in the Democratic primaries had he announced publicly in January what he just now concluded in December: "Vote for my change ,and I promise you more of Bob Gates at Defense, my rival Hillary Rodham Clinton (with help from Bill) at State, Gen. James Jones as national security adviser, Clinton pros John Podesta and Rahm Emanuel running my transition - and the evangelical pastor Rick Warren conducting my inaugural invocation. And what I am saying now about wiretaps, NAFTA, the Patriot Act, campaign financing, Iran, Iraq, missile defense, coal and nuclear power and taxes will have to be changed when I'm elected."

"All things change," the Greek philosopher Heraclitus supposedly wrote over 2,500 years ago - but nothing like they did in 2008.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. To comment, e-mail him at author@victorhanson.com.

This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

 

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VDH on challenges to the Western way of War:

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=11

The Future of Western War

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University. He is a columnist for National Review Online and for Tribune Media Services, and has published in several journals and newspapers, including Commentary, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Hanson has written or edited numerous books, including The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on October 1, 2009, during the author's four-week teaching residency.


I want to talk about the Western way of war and about the particular challenges that face the West today. But the first point I want to make is that war is a human enterprise that will always be with us. Unless we submit to genetic engineering, or unless video games have somehow reprogrammed our brains, or unless we are fundamentally changed by eating different nutrients—these are possibilities brought up by so-called peace and conflict resolution theorists—human nature will not change. And if human nature will not change—and I submit to you that human nature is a constant—then war will always be with us. Its methods or delivery systems—which can be traced through time from clubs to catapults and from flintlocks to nuclear weapons—will of course change. In this sense war is like water. You can pump water at 60 gallons per minute with a small gasoline engine or at 5000 gallons per minute with a gigantic turbine pump. But water is water—the same today as in 1880 or 500 B.C. Likewise war, because the essence of war is human nature.

Second, in talking about the Western way of war, what do we mean by the West? Roughly speaking, we refer to the culture that originated in Greece, spread to Rome, permeated Northern Europe, was incorporated by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, spread through British expansionism, and is associated today primarily with Europe, the United States, and the former commonwealth countries of Britain—as well as, to some extent, nations like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, which have incorporated some Western ideas. And what are Western ideas? This question is disputed, but I think we know them when we see them. They include a commitment to constitutional or limited government, freedom of the individual, religious freedom in a sense that precludes religious tyranny, respect for property rights, faith in free markets, and an openness to rationalism or to the explanation of natural phenomena through reason. These ideas were combined in various ways through Western history, and eventually brought us to where we are today. The resultant system creates more prosperity and affluence than any other. And of course, I don't mean to suggest that there was Jeffersonian democracy in 13th century England or in the Swiss cantons. But the blueprint for free government always existed in the West, in a way that it didn't elsewhere.

Just as this system afforded more prosperity in times of peace, it led to a superior fighting and defense capability in times of war. This is what I call the Western way of war, and there are several factors at play.

First, constitutional government was conducive to civilian input when it came to war. We see this in ancient Athens, where civilians oversaw a board of generals, and we see it in civilian control of the military in the United States. And at crucial times in Western history, civilian overseers have enriched military planning.

Second, Western culture gave birth to a new definition of courage. In Hellenic culture, the prowess of a hero was not recognized by the number of heads on his belt. As Aristotle noted in the Politics, Greek warriors didn't wear trophies of individual killings. Likewise, Victoria Crosses and Medals of Honor are awarded today for deeds such as staying in rank, protecting the integrity of the line, advancing and retreating on orders, or rescuing a comrade. This reflects a quite different understanding of heroism.

A third factor underlies our association of Western war with advanced technology. When reason and capitalism are applied to the battlefield, powerful innovations come about. Flints, percussion caps, rifle barrels and mini balls, to cite just a few examples, were all Western inventions. Related to this, Western armies—going back to Alexander the Great's army at the Indus—have a better logistics capability. A recent example is that the Americans invading Iraq were better supplied with water than the native Iraqis. This results from the application of capitalism to military affairs—uniting private self-interest and patriotism to provide armies with food, supplies, and munitions in a way that is much more efficient than the state-run command-and-control alternatives.


Yet another factor is that Western armies are impatient. They tend to want to seek out and destroy the enemy quickly and then go home. Of course, this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, as we see today in Afghanistan, where the enemy is not so eager for decisive battle. And connected to this tradition is dissent. Today the U.S. military is a completely volunteer force, and its members' behavior on the battlefield largely reflects how they conduct themselves in civil society. One can trace this characteristic of Western armies back to Xenophon's ten thousand, who marched from Northern Iraq to the Black Sea and behaved essentially as a traveling city-state, voting and arguing in a constitutional manner. And their ability to do that is what saved them, not just their traditional discipline.
Now, I would not want to suggest that the West has always been victorious in war. It hasn't. But consider the fact that Europe had a very small population and territory, and yet by 1870 the British Empire controlled 75 percent of the world. What the Western way of war achieved, on any given day, was to give its practitioners—whether Cortez in the Americas, the British in Zululand, or the Greeks in Thrace—a greater advantage over their enemies. There are occasional defeats such as the battles of Cannae, Isandlwana, and Little Big Horn. Over a long period of time, however, the Western way of war will lead us to where we are today.


But where exactly are we today? There have been two developments over the last 20 years that have placed the West in a new cycle. They have not marked the end of the Western way of war, but they have brought about a significant change. The first is the rapid electronic dissemination of knowledge—such that someone in the Hindu Kush tonight can download a sophisticated article on how to make an IED. And the second is that non-Western nations now have leverage, given how global economies work today, through large quantities of strategic materials that Western societies need, such as natural gas, oil, uranium, and bauxite. Correspondingly, these materials produce tremendous amounts of unearned capital in non-Western countries—and by "unearned," I mean that the long process of civilization required to create, for example, a petroleum engineer has not occurred in these countries, yet they find themselves in possession of the monetary fruits of this process. So the West's enemies now have instant access to knowledge and tremendous capital.


In addition to these new developments, there are five traditional checks on the Western way of war that are intensified today. One of these checks is the Western tendency to limit the ferocity of war through rules and regulations. The Greeks tried to outlaw arrows and catapults. Romans had restrictions on the export of breast plates. In World War II, we had regulations against poison gas. Continuing this tradition today, we are trying to achieve nuclear non-proliferation. Unfortunately, the idea that Western countries can adjudicate how the rest of the world makes war isn't applicable anymore. As we see clearly in Iran, we are dealing with countries that have the wealth of Western nations (for the reasons just mentioned), but are anything but constitutional democracies. In fact, these nations find the idea of limiting their war-making capabilities laughable. Even more importantly, they know that many in the West sympathize with them—that many Westerners feel guilty about their wealth, prosperity, and leisure, and take psychological comfort in letting tyrants like Ahmadinejad provoke them.


The second check on the Western way of war is the fact that there is no monolithic West. For one thing, Western countries have frequently fought one another. Most people killed in war have been Europeans killing other Europeans, due to religious differences and political rivalries. And consider, in this light, how fractured the West is today. The U.S. and its allies can't even agree on sanctions against Iran. Everyone knows that once Iran obtains nuclear weapons—in addition to its intention to threaten Israel and to support terrorists—it will begin to aim its rockets at Frankfurt, Munich, and Paris, and to ask for further trade concessions and seek regional hegemony. And in this case, unlike when we deterred Soviet leaders during the Cold War, Westerners will be dealing with theocratic zealots who claim that they do not care about living, making them all the more dangerous. Yet despite all this, to repeat, the Western democracies can't agree on sanctions or even on a prohibition against selling technology and arms.


The third check is what I call "parasitism." It is very difficult to invent and fabricate weapons, but it is very easy to use them. Looking back in history, we have examples of Aztecs killing Conquistadors using steel breast plates and crossbows and of Native Americans using rifles against the U.S. Cavalry. Similarly today, nobody in Hezbollah can manufacture an AK-47—which is built by Russians and made possible by Western design principles—but its members can make deadly use of them. Nor is there anything in the tradition of Shiite Islam that would allow a Shiite nation to create centrifuges, which require Western physics. Yet centrifuges are hard at work in Iran. And this parasitism has real consequences. When the Israelis went into Lebanon in 2006, they were surprised that young Hezbollah fighters had laptop computers with sophisticated intelligence programs; that Hezbollah intelligence agents were sending out doctored photos, making it seem as if Israel was targeting civilians, to Reuters and the AP; and that Hezbollah had obtained sophisticated anti-tank weapons on the international market using Iranian funds. At that point it didn't matter that the Israelis had a sophisticated Western culture, and so it could not win the war.


A fourth check is the ever-present anti-war movement in the West, stemming from the fact that Westerners are free to dissent. And by "ever-present" I mean that long before Michael Moore appeared on the scene, we had Euripides' Trojan Women and Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Of course, today's anti-war movement is much more virulent than in Euripides' and Aristophanes' time. This is in part because people like Michael Moore do not feel they are in any real danger from their countries' enemies. They know that if push comes to shove, the 101st Airborne will ultimately ensure their safety. That is why Moore can say right after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden should have attacked a red state rather than a blue state. And since Western wars tend to be fought far from home, rather than as a defense against invasions, there is always the possibility that anti-war sentiment will win out and that armies will be called home. Our enemies know this, and often their words and actions are aimed at encouraging and aiding Western anti-war forces.


Finally and most seriously, I think, there is what I call, for want of a better term, "asymmetry." Western culture creates citizens who are affluent, leisured, free, and protected. Human nature being what it is, we citizens of the West often want to enjoy our bounty and retreat into private lives—to go home, eat pizza, and watch television. This is nothing new. I would refer you to Petronius's Satyricon, a banquet scene written around 60 A.D. about affluent Romans who make fun of the soldiers who are up on the Rhine protecting them. This is what Rome had become. And it's not easy to convince someone who has the good life to fight against someone who doesn't.


To put this in contemporary terms, what we are asking today is for a young man with a $250,000 education from West Point to climb into an Apache helicopter—after emailing back and forth with his wife and kids about what went on at a PTA meeting back in Bethesda, Maryland—and fly over Anbar province or up to the Hindu Kush and risk being shot down by a young man from a family of 15, none of whom will ever live nearly as well as the poorest citizens of the United States, using a weapon whose design he doesn't even understand. In a moral sense, the lives of these two young men are of equal value. But in reality, our society values the lives of our young men much more than Afghan societies value the lives of theirs. And it is very difficult to sustain a protracted war with asymmetrical losses under those conditions.

My point here is that all of the usual checks on the tradition of Western warfare are magnified in our time. And I will end with this disturbing thought: We who created the Western way of war are very reluctant to resort to it due to post-modern cynicism, while those who didn't create it are very eager to apply it due to pre-modern zealotry. And that's a very lethal combination.

 

[a_majoor]

VDH on the American recession. His observations about the breakdown of regulation and compliance bode ill, especially since California seems to have become the preview of what the Obama Administration wants for the entire nation.

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-tour-through-recession-america/?singlepage=true

A Tour Through Recession America

The last seven days I tried to jot down what I saw in some slices of America in recession — and much of its seems at odds with our general government narrative.

Let me explain my unscientific methodology of seeking to catch a glimpse of the lower, middle, and upper classes of all races and ethnicities.

I rode a bike about 100 miles on the roads of rural California, in quite poor areas surrounding towns like Selma, Caruthers, and Laton. Then to taste an antithesis, I spent four days at work at tony Palo Alto. I rode a bike there too, as well as walking through the downtown area in a 10-block swath. Finally, for something in the middle, I have been browsing the shopping centers in Fresno — places like Target, Best Buy, Save Mart, and Home Depot.

Are We Parasites?

This week I drove on I-5, the 99, and 101. Except for a few stretches through San Jose to Palo Alto, most of the freeways were unchanged in the last 40 years. The California Water Project of the 1960s hasn’t been improved — indeed, it has been curtailed. My local high school looks about the same as it did in 1971. The roads in rural California are in worse condition than forty years ago.

Private houses are, of course, larger and more opulent. But the state seems not to be investing in infrastructure as before, but more in consumption and redistribution. For all the mega-deficits out here, we are not going broke building upon and improving the material world we inherited. The drive from Selma to Palo Alto is identical to the one I made in 1975 — no quicker, not really safer. The comfort and increased safety come from improved cars (seat belts, air bags, better structures), not from government’s efforts to make super freeways and new routes.

Not Quite the Great Depression

Here  follows some other unscientific observations. This is a funny recession. My grandfather’s stories of the Great Depression — 27 relatives in my current farmhouse and barn — were elemental: trying to find enough food to survive, and saving gasoline by shifting to neutral and gliding to stops or on the downhill.

The problem I saw this week was rampant obesity, across all age and class lines. If anything, the wealthier in Palo Alto/Stanford eat less (yes, I know the liberal critique that they have capital and education to shop for expensive healthier fruits and vegetables while the poor and neglected must turn to fast food, coke, and pop tarts). No matter — a lot of Americans are eating too much and moving too infrequently — and no one, at least if girth matters, is starving.

There is a new beggar. I see him on the intersections now on major urban boulevards. They are never illegal aliens, rarely African-Americans, but almost all white males, and of two sorts. One is someone who looks homeless, not crippled but in a walker or wheelchair (yet he gets up occasionally). He has a sign on cardboard with a wrenching narrative (fill in the blanks: veteran, of course; disabled; will work (not) for food, etc.). Choice corners become almost enclaves, as two or three cluster on islands and stoplights, as if certain franchises are choice and more lucrative than others.

A newer second sort is younger, more upscale. One fellow looked like a fraternity brat with a sign that said “Mom has cancer. No health insurance. Please help!” Another burly lad, well fed and toned, had a placard, “Need gas money. Broke down.” Yet a third waved a card, “Sudden wedding, need money.”

My illiberal side suggests that if we were to investigate, both types have not inconsiderable cash in their pockets. They certainly feel there is no shame in begging. All that is changed from antiquity is that we have eliminated the vocabulary not the act: beggars don’t exist; “homeless” and the “needy” do.

For a recession, there are lots of Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses, and Volvos around — and in places like Fresno too. Maybe these are just leases (renters who prefer to lease a big car than buy houses), but for depression-era times, our contemporary versions of the Packard or Pierce-Arrow are pretty ubiquitous. (Note: I still can’t see how a Mercedes or Lexus warrants the far higher price over, say, a Camry or Accord that seem as comfortable and reliable). Thirty years ago one saw an upscale car on the Stanford campus; today you see them on an American high school campus.

The Lost Generation

A new cohort between 21 and 30 is becoming a lost generation — and with good reason. They don’t seem to be working full-time or have good jobs with secure futures. Instead, from construction to teaching, there are far fewer sustainable careers for young people. But given family ties, they can live at home, postpone marriage, find part-time work, and rely on essentials like rent and food from the old embryo, while using what little is made for discretionary spending — allowing the veneer of middle class opulence to continue.

That is, for a deep recession, there seems to be a lot of young people out on weekdays at about 10 AM at stores, with good clothes and appurtenances, and apparently no substantial incomes. Is this sustainable, this ability to have discretionary spending, while outsourcing housing and food to one’s parents?

Reversion

There are areas of rural California that are “reverting.” By that I mean old statutes no longer apply. On one stretch of road nearby there are suddenly three new “restaurants.” By this, I mean so-called mobile hot kitchen vans serving Mexican food have anchored, plopped down roots in driveways, and added awnings, some benches and lights.  Presto, the owners seem to have avoided all the once feared California regulations concerning proper restroom facilities, sanitation, building codes, and reported taxes. I infer all that since these permanent establishments suddenly disappear and reappear rooted to new locations, apparently if cited or investigated.

As a rough estimate from this week’s travel, I would guess that there are thousands of illegal aliens living in garages in rural California, or in beached inoperative trailers. Almost one of two rural farmhouses has some sort of Winnebago-like vehicle hooked up to electrical service. In Selma and Caruthers, there are lots of garages that seemed to have morphed into rentals. In other words, in one of the most highly regulated, highly taxed regions in America, noncompliance at every level seems the norm.

Reader, help me here: one of two things seems to be going on. The more a state sets down rules, the more they are simply ignored, to such a degree that basic and necessary zoning and health statutes become more laxly enforced than in red-state, small government cultures.

Or is it that the state regulators feel enforcement of  myriad of rules would be unfair to, or impossible with, the illegal alien Hispanic community? I rode by one compound, counted five extraneous homesteads of sorts behind the main frame house, a dozen dogs, and all sorts of illegal wiring schemes — a regulator’s dream? My hunch is that the bureaucrat regulator would rather spend time in the Sierra hassling a compliant cabin owner I know for putting on a new metal roof that was without the properly approved tint.

Middle-Class Veneer

The combinations of cheap Chinese goods, easy access to credit cards, and generous entitlements — such as Section 8 housing, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid health care, disability payments — that cover essentials and free up money for discretionary spending, have combined to give the proverbial lower middle class access to consumer purchases undreamed of twenty years ago.  As a graduate student in 1975-80, I bought a used 19-inch black and white TV for $40 and saved for weeks to purchase it. Today, 52-inch plasma televisions seem no longer the birthrights of the oligarchy.  We have created a new sort of impoverished.

In one way, dozens who shop at Home Depot and Costco and Save Mart are poor in the sense that they cannot go to Europe, or even to the aquarium in Monterey or Disneyland. But in terms of cell phones, DVD players, plasma TVs, or radios, there is no difference from the upper echelons in this recession.

In the old days a poor house in rural Selma would have poor plumbing and no insulation; today’s apartment, in terms of hot water heater, oven, cook top, or air conditioner, is not much different than those found in the estates above Stanford.

I can’t quite see how imported granite countertops in a 8,000 square foot estate translate into better food preparation than does cheap tile counters in a $500 a month apartment in Selma.

Note well that no politician ever gives the U.S. credit for extending the veneer of American consumer comfort to nearly all its 300 million residents. I say nearly all, since if someone can cross the border from Oaxaca, enter Selma, and have an iPhone that connects to the world wide internet, instant weather reports, and a GPS, then poverty as we knew is not really old-fashioned want — despite the John Edwards’ two nations rhetoric.

Where Does it All End?

I confess this week to have listened in on many conversations in Palo Alto and at Stanford, read local newspapers, and simply watched people. So I am as worried about the elite upscale yuppie as the poor illegal alien. The former have lost almost all connection with physical labor, the physical world, or the ordeal that civilization endures to elevate us from the savagery of nature.

While many were fit, and seem to work out, bike, ski, and hike, none understood the mechanics that lie beneath the veneer of the good life — the chain-sawing, hammering, drain-unplugging, tractor-driving, irrigating, and welding that allows a pleasant afternoon Greek salad and cappuccino on University Avenue — the disconnect between those Pennsylvania “clingers” and Obama’s arugula-eating crowd.

So much hinges on impressions. I listened to two young attractive women bemoan housing prices in Menlo Park — $1,000,000 for a modest 2 bath-3 bedroom older cottage in a “good” neighborhood. For that amount, each would be royalty in Fresno, perched on the bluffs over the San Joaquin River in a massive 5,000 sq. foot estate, with a half-acre yard.

A strange elite I suppose likes and pays for the ambience — that is, living among people like themselves — of upscale university centered communities. Why? I have a theory. It allows them to be liberal and progressive in the abstract, without having to live the logical consequences of their utopianism, or deal with the underbelly of American life. Take the most sophisticated Palo Alto dweller, and a week outside of Laton on a farm would make her, well, “seasoned” so to speak, and challenge much of her assumptions about wealth and poverty.

As I watch this teeming recession-era energy — thousands leaving squalor in Mexico for the life raft of the U.S., thousands in the middle buying as birthright what a few decades ago would be considered the playthings of the aristocracy, and thousands living in a progressive bubble disconnected from the grime and mess that fuels it — I hope there are still enough around to keep all this going. I say that because a new Microsoft program, a better search engine, another recent arrival from Chiapas, and someone out of work and still at Best Buy simply are not going to get us out of this recession, find the energy to keep the country fueled, and create the money to pay off a soon-to-be $ 20 trillion debt. In short, from this week’s observations, I think our so-called poor need to read a bit more, and our assumed elite to read a bit less.

 

[a_majoor]

Does this explain the world view of the president and the administration?

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/america-101/

America 101 With Dean Obama

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On May 15, 2010 @ 1:42 pm In Uncategorized | 10 Comments

America is now a campus, and Obama is our Dean

This is the strangest presidency I have seen in my lifetime. President Obama gives soaring lectures on civility, but still continues his old campaign invective (“get in their face,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” etc.) with new attacks  on particular senators, Rush Limbaugh, and entire classes of people—surgeons, insurers, Wall Street, those at Fox News, tea-partiers, etc.

And like the campaign, he still talks of bipartisanship (remember, he was the most partisan politician in the Senate), but has rammed through health care without a single Republican vote. His entire agenda—federal take-overs of businesses, near two-trillion-dollar deficits, health care, amnesty, and cap and trade—does not earn a majority in the polls. Indeed, the same surveys reveal him to be the most polarizing president in memory.

His base was hyper-critical of deficit spending under Bush, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and government involvement with Wall Street. But suddenly even the most vocal of the left have gone silent as Obama’s felonies have trumped Bush’s misdemeanors on every count.

All this reminds me of the LaLa land of academia. Let me explain.

That Was Then, This is Now

Last week, Obama was at it again. He blasted the oil companies and his own government for lax regulation in the Gulf, apparently convinced that no one in the media would consider his last 16 months of governance in any way responsible for, well, federal governance. (I don’t have strong views on the degree of culpability a president has for lax federal agencies amid disasters, only that I learned from the media between 2004-8 that a president must accept a great deal blame after most catastrophes [at least Katrina was nature- rather than human- induced].)

Obama also trashed, inter alia, Halliburton for the spill, as he had done on other matters ritually in the campaign (“I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all,” “The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton will be over when I’m in the White House”). Obama seemed to assume that few cared that his administration just gave Halliburton a $568 million no-bid contract.

Standards for Thee, But Not …

When a Senator Obama a while back weighed in on the ill-fated Harriet Miers, he quite logically predicated his skepticism on a dearth of publications (though I found that embarrassing at the time since Senator/Law Professor Obama was essentially without a record of scholarly work), and an absence of judicial experience—both legitimate concerns. So, of course, are we now to expect Obama to talk up his recent Supreme Court nominee Ms. Kagan, and ignore her relative lack of scholarly experience without a judicial past (sort of like being secretary of education without having taught anything)? Does the president, who as a senator voted to deny a court seat to Alito and Roberts, think Kagan is better qualified than either, and, if so, on what grounds—more scholarship, more judicial experience, a more diverse upbringing, intangible criteria like once recruiting Barack Obama?

I once wondered during the campaign whether such serial contradictions in the Obama narrative ever mattered. During his denials of ever hearing Rev. Wright engage in the pastor’s trademark hate speech, I recalled Obama’s 2004 interview with the Sun-Times when he was running for the Senate and wanted to boast of his religious fides. When asked, “Do you still attend Trinity?” Obama snapped right back, “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service.” Every week, but mysteriously not those in which Wright did his customary race-bashing?

When for the first time since 1976 a presidential candidate reneged on promises to participate in pubic financing in the general relations, I remembered Obama’s early promise to do the opposite. The press slept on that.

The list of his blatant contradictions could be multiplied. I’ve written here about the past demagoguing on tribunals, Predators, Guantanamo, renditions, Afghanistan, Iraq, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act, and the subsequent Obama embrace of all of them, in some cases even trumping Bush in his exuberance.

The Never-ending Story

We could play this game with the entire health care debate—all on C-SPAN, will save billions, not cost billions as the CBO now attests, etc.—the pledge not to hire lobbyists or allow earmarks, to pledge to post legislation for a specified time on the government website, the pledge to prohibit his team from returning within 2 years to the private lobbying revolving door, and so on.

The blatant hypocrisy and untruths are superimposed on a constant (it has not yet begun to let up in his second year) refrain of either “Bush did it” or “the opposition won’t let me be bipartisan.”

Where does this disregard for the truth arise? On the most superficial level, of course, Obama realizes that the media is obsequious and sanctions almost anything he does.  He knows that his base was always interested in power, not principle (has anyone seen any war protests the last few weeks against Afghanistan or Iraq, or Guantanamo, or the quadrupling of Predator attacks? Or for that matter, are there anti-Obama Hispanic protests over the increased crackdown on employers and greater deportations than during the Bush era?).

America 101

Yet again, neither the press nor his chameleon followers quite explain what is going on. Instead, I think we, the American people, are seen by Obama as a sort of Ivy League campus, with him as an untouchable dean. So we get the multicultural bromides, the constant groupthink, and the reinvention of the self that we see so often among a professional class of administrator in universities (we used to get their memos daily and they read like an Obama teleprompted speech).  Given his name, pedigree, charisma, and eloquence, Obama could say or do almost anything—in the way race/class/gender adjudicate reality on campus, or perhaps in the manner the old gentleman C, pedigreed rich students at prewar Princeton sleepwalked through their bachelor’s degrees, almost as a birthright. (I am willing to apologize for this crude analogy when the Obama Columbia undergraduate transcript is released and explains his next rung Harvard.) In other words, the public does not grasp to what degree supposedly elite universities simply wave their own rules when they find it convenient.

In academia, there are few consequences for much of anything; but in Obama’s case his legal career at Chicago seems inexplicable without publications (and even more surreal when Law Dean Kagan laments on tape her difficulties in recruiting him to the law school—but how would that be possible when a five- or six-book law professor from a Texas or UC Irvine would never get such an offer from a Chicago or Harvard?).

What You Say You Are

On an elite university campus what you have constructed yourself into always matters more than what you have done. An accent mark here, a hyphenated name there is always worth a book or two. There is no bipartisanship or indeed any political opposition on campuses; if the Academic Senate weighs in on national issues to “voice concern,” the ensuing margin of vote is usually along the lines of Saddam’s old lopsided referenda.

In other words, Obama assumed as dean he would talk one way, do another, and was confident he could “contextualize” and “construct” a differing narrative—to anyone foolish enough who questioned the inconsistency. As we have seen with Climategate, or the Gore fraud, intent always trumps empiricism in contemporary intellectual circles. Obama simply cannot be held to the same standard we apply to most other politicians—given his heritage, noble intention, and landmark efforts to transform America into something far fairer.

Like so many academics, Obama becomes petulant when crossed, and like them as well, he “deigns” to know very little out of his field (from Cinco de Mayo to the liberation of Auschwitz), and only a little more in it. Obama voiced the two main gospels of the elite campus: support for redistributive mechanisms with other people’s wealth; and while abroad, a sort of affirmative action for less successful nations: those who are failing and criticized the U.S. under Bush proved insightful and worthy of outreach ( a Russia or Syria); but those who allied themselves with us (an Israel or Colombia) are now suspect.

The Intrusions of the Real World

How does our tenure with Obama as dean end?

I have no idea other than I think at some point Obama’s untruths, hypocrisies, and contradictions will, in their totality, finally remind the voter he is not a student.

After all, America is not a campus. It has real jobs that are not lifelong sinecures. Americans work summers. There are consequences when rhetoric does not match reality. Outside of Harvard or Columbia, debt has to be paid back and is not called stimulus. We worry about jobs lost, not those in theory created or saved. We don’t blame predecessors for our own ongoing failures. Those who try to kill us are enemies, whose particular grievances we don’t care much to know about. Diversity is lived rather than professed; temporizing is not seen as reflection, but weakness.

And something not true in not a mere competing narrative, but a flat-out lie.

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/america-101/

 

[a_majoor]

Without comment:

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/kingdom-of-lies/?singlepage=true

Kingdom of Lies

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On April 3, 2011 @ 10:12 am In Uncategorized | 73 Comments

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies [1] that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.

I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.

But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.

As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent — uncover some corporate or CIA conspiracy that threatens the environment (their employers and distributors are not corporate?), the non-white male, or global peace — or sit through yuppie crises whose double entendres and cute repartees are known mostly only to metrosexuals between New York and D.C., or from Malibu to Newport Beach. We are told they are films, but those too are lies; they are mere transcripts of the daily psychodramas of a privileged and bored class whose efforts are spent searching for global causes that might balance [2] — as penance if you will — their own often angst-driven quests for influence, notoriety, and the material good life.

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all [3]. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.

The Goldstone Report [4], I thought when I first scanned it, was worse than most undergraduate research papers I have graded — and therefore I expected it to be praised by the international community. And it was until even the author, like the rare guilty undergraduate who confesses to plagiarism, wants his signature off the report. But then long ago I got used to Israel being damned by reporters, NGOs, and the UN and EU types as apartheidists, racists, imperialists, and Nazis in direct proportion to the fact that visitors to the Middle East usually prefer to go Israeli cafes, hotels, and hospitals. Reporting on the West Bank is a 10 AM-2 PM day job, with a commute back across the green line. Half a million Jews ethnically cleansed in the 1960s from Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus were opportunists; half a million who fled to the West Bank twenty years earlier are still recently arrived refugees. But then I don’t know why Jerusalem is a divided city and Nicosia is not; or why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied”; or why the fence in Israel is worse than the fence in Saudi Arabia.

I have no idea whether invading in preemptive fashion an oil-producing, Arab Muslim country without congressional approval is an impeachable or humanitarian act — or both. You see, it depends, in the manner that Trotsky’s photo [5] used to, and then did not used to, appear in the snapshots of the Soviet pantheon. I suppose the same is true about prisoner abuse. I remember traveling in Europe and seeing those eerie black Klan-like hoods and capes with all sort of French, Italian and German sloganeering about the atrocious sexual humiliation that took place at Abu Ghraib, but I imagine this summer there won’t be much about supposed transgressions in Afghanistan where civilians were supposed to have been executed rather than humiliated. Things just happen, I suppose, in wars after 2009 — like now in Libya too.

I also have a sense, although it has never been quite so ordered by the Ministry, that a nut burning a bible is either artistic expression or a proper antidote to centuries of repression and so to be either applauded or ignored; but a nut burning a Koran evokes decapitations and murder and does so quite understandably — although I am never told quite why. Does it involve liberal paternalism and condescension: millions of Muslim radicals are captives of emotion [6] and ignorant and thus not “like us,”so we must create much different standards for “them” that we don’t apply to others? We as adults laugh when symbols of Christianity are defaced in thousands of incidents; they as children naturally and understandably kill when one Koran is burned by one silly wannabe minister? Or is the Ministry’s fear that when Christ is satirized in a cartoon, no bomb shows up at the editorial office; when Mohammed is so caricatured, two do — and that because reporters are said always to be brave and publishers principled we cannot just admit to that?

I think I also understand that the support for 11 million illegal aliens arriving here from Mexico without English, legality, or education is not fueled by tribal and ethnic chauvinism. I know that to suggest that extending immigration consideration to a new cadre of 11 million Koreans, Chinese, Africans, and Europeans with graduate degrees and capital would be racist to the core. The former group from Oaxaca is diverse, the latter from almost everywhere illiberal. I have seen those demonstrating for amnesty deprecate the U.S and its flag while championing Mexico, and I think I am supposed to understand that screaming at the country you wish to stay in, while singing praises for the country you do not makes perfect non-sense, in Humpty-Dumpty word fashion. And I know I am not supposed to say that, much less explain why millions flee here from a temperate and fertile south and not from an Arctic north.

I know that UC Berkeley is worried about diversity since blacks and Latinos are underrepresented (as are whites) while Asians are vastly “overrepresented.” And I think I understand how such proportional representation will eventually be achieved by various ministries, and all contrary to state law: the underrepresented whites will be assumed to be overrepresented, the Asians will be quietly and insidiously pruned back by considering “community service” in preference to grades and test scores, and far more African-Americans and Latinos will be admitted by rejecting unfair criteria such as meaningless grades and test scores — and that all this — not science or the humane arts — will be mostly the business of the architects of undergraduate education. The alternatives? They are too ghastly to contemplate. Just let things alone, and the underrepresented communities will decide on their own why they are not going to college in sufficient numbers, and take self-help measures to the degree they see it as a problem — or shrug and admit that the ministries are using archaic neo-Confederate racial criteria [7] in a mixed-up, intermarried world where one needs a genealogist to plot one’s precise racial ancestry.

I think I have it right that conservative Republican white guys are selfish and greedy, and therefore a liberal Bill Gates or George Soros made their billions by enlightened, or green, or socially useful methods. Did BP and Goldman Sachs really favor Barack Obama? Will they again? Were Freddie and Fannie really looted by Clintonites? Did GE pay no taxes [8]? Is there still a revolving door in Washington where a Robert Gibbs, of no discernible talent, or a Peter Orszag, who nearly wrecked the economy with massive deficit spending, are now poised to become progressive multimillionaires?

Is making millions from Facebook, or GM, or GE now fine in a way it is not from the Koch Brothers? Again, these are just the thoughts of someone trying to read between the lines of the Oceania censors. (So we are to think the Tea Partiers are the greedy reactionary and wealthy, and the millionaire donors targeted by the Obama reelection [9] committee merely generous?)

I don’t know what “investments” and “stimulus” mean. Do any of you? I think they refer to borrowing over $500 billion for a particular green or mass transit project. But then I don’t know what “green” means either, and for that matter don’t know what is the difference between “global warming” and “climate change” — other than earthquakes and tsunamis sometimes count under the latter, as do cyclones and hail storms. I do know that when I go to the Sierra tomorrow to shovel 15 feet of March snow off a porch I am supposed to assume these last two record winters of heavy snowfall [10] had something to do with climate change. After all, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu warned that 90% of the Sierra snow pack will one day disappear and my farm, like all the others, will blow away — and that apparently somehow, some way, sometimes too much snow is just part of that drying out process.

As far as ‘kinetic” and “man-caused disasters” and “overseas contingency operations,” I think they have something do with killing terrorists. I also assume those who do fight the bad guys do not employ such euphemisms, which are for our, not their, consumption. We, the administered to, live in a “downright mean” [11] country; our administers go to Costa del Sol in summer and Vail in winter on the mean country’s dime.

In this kingdom of lies, this Oceania of the mind, I, a subject of the monarchy of untruth, navigate carefully, assuming what I read and see is simply not true — and cannot be said to be untrue. Last week at the Post Office, a rather well-dressed young man in line was explaining to me that he was wondering why his unemployment check had not come to his PO Box. And then he further offered that he is now negotiating, or rather hoping, for his unemployment to be extended beyond his second year. I smiled and said, “That’s wonderful, because I know you are not working off the books for cash, and I know you are looking for a job all day long, and I know that if your benefits ever end, you will not suddenly find work.”

The odd thing was that he laughed and thought those were lies too.

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/kingdom-of-lies/

URLs in this post:

[1] of their biographies: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090226171138/http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt

[2] that might balance: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/06/05/richard-dreyfuss-discovers-his-mini-me/

[3] heard of them not all: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-rise-of-the-uncouth/?singlepage=true

[4] The Goldstone Report: http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2011/04/02/judge-richard-goldstones-stunning-re-evaluation-a-partial-apologia-but-one-that-comes-at-the-right-time/

[5] Trotsky’s photo: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html

[6] captives of emotion: http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/117906/

[7] neo-Confederate racial criteria: http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory121602.asp

[8] pay no taxes: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/313868.php

[9] targeted by the Obama reelection: http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2011/04/03/obama-earnestly-seeking-out-big-money-donors-whom-we-once-criticized/

[10] record winters of heavy snowfall: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/12/19/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past/

[11] “downright mean”: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/05/michelle-obama-america-just-downright-mean

 

[a_majoor]

VDH offers a dark view of what the near future may bring:

http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/12/06/4273844_victor-davis-hanson-a-large-war.html?rh=1

Victor Davis Hanson: A large war is looming
By Victor DavisHanson
FresnoDecember 6, 2014

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before.

In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored.

The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others.

The same was true in 1939. The tragedy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was not that it had been too harsh. In fact, it was far milder than the terms Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in 1918 or the requirements it had planned for France in 1914.

Instead, Versailles combined the worst of both worlds: harsh language without any means of enforcement.

The subsequent appeasement of Britain and France, the isolationism of the United States, and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany green-lighted Hitler’s aggression — and another world war.

We are entering a similarly dangerous interlude. Collapsing oil prices — a good thing for most of the world — will make troublemakers like oil-exporting Iran and Russia take even more risks.

Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State feel that conventional military power has no effect on their agendas. The West is seen as a tired culture of Black Friday shoppers and maxed-out credit card holders.

NATO is underfunded and without strong American leadership. It can only hope that Vladimir Putin does not invade a NATO country like Estonia, rather than prepare for the likelihood that he will, and soon.

The United States has slashed its defense budget to historic lows. It sends the message abroad that friendship with America brings few rewards while hostility toward the U.S. has even fewer consequences. The bedrock American relationships with staunch allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan and Israel are fading. Instead, we court new belligerents that don’t like the United States, such as Turkey and Iran.

No one has any idea of how to convince a rising China that its turn toward military aggression will only end in disaster, in much the same fashion that a confident westernizing Imperial Japan overreached in World War II. Lecturing loudly and self-righteously while carrying a tiny stick did not work with Japanese warlords of the 1930s. It won’t work with the communist Chinese either.

Radical Islam is spreading in the same sort of way that postwar communism once swamped postcolonial Asia, Africa and Latin America. But this time there are only weak responses from the democratic, free-market West. Westerners despair over which is worse — theocratic Iran, the Islamic State or Bashar Assad’s Syria — and seem paralyzed over where exactly the violence will spread next and when it will reach them.

There once was a time when the United States encouraged the Latin American transition to free-market constitutional government, away from right-wing dictatorships. Now, America seems uninterested in making a similar case that left-wing dictatorships are just as threatening to the idea of freedom and human rights.

In the late 1930s, it was pathetic that countries with strong militaries such as France and Britain appeased fascist leader Benito Mussolini and allowed his far weaker Italian forces to do as they pleased by invading Ethiopia. Similarly, Iranian negotiators are attempting to dictate terms of a weak Iran to a strong United States in talks about Iran’s supposedly inherent right to produce weapons-grade uranium — a process that Iran had earlier bragged would lead to the production of a bomb.

The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.

Under such conditions, history’s wars usually start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/12/06/4273844_victor-davis-hanson-a-large-war.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

 

[MilEME09]

I agree that the conditions are right however the nuclear aspect when it comes to Russia and china is big, IF and i do mean a big if the west can deploy an effective missile shield that could stop a nuclear tipped missile with near 100% accuracy it would be a game changer. If the nuclear equation was gone a long conventional war is guarantied

 

[Retired AF Guy]

I must say VDH is a lot more pessimistic then Paul Robinson was in yesterdays National Post which, is re-produced here under the usual caveats of the Copyright Act.

Paul Robinson: Don’t panic — the world is not becoming more dangerous

Paul Robinson, National Post | December 8, 2014 7:23 AM ET

Compared with the Cold War era, the last 20 years have seen less armed conflict worldwide, less terrorism and more political stability.

“In this year much of our world has become a darker place,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper in late October following the murders of two Canadian soldiers in Quebec and Ottawa, “and certainly it has become more dangerous.” Some gap between perception and reality is inevitable, but Harper’s words show how public discourse on international security has not merely diverged from reality, but has become completely unhinged from it. It is now widely assumed that the world is becoming, as Harper says, “more dangerous.” But this assumption is just plain wrong.

Compared with the Cold War era, the last 20 years have seen less armed conflict worldwide, less terrorism and more political stability. Unfortunately, a refusal to recognize this reality has led to repeated demands for more aggressive security policies to combat supposedly growing threats. These policies have included greater powers for the police and security services and military interventions overseas, which have been costly in blood and treasure but have brought few, if any, benefits. In general these policies have proven counter-productive, undermining the West’s moral authority and creating unnecessary enemies. The greatest danger facing Canada and the Western world is not any of the dangers about which we currently worry, but self-inflicted threat inflation.

Today’s threat is a serial shapeshifter, repeatedly metamorphosing into something different every time we cease to be scared. In its first post-Cold War manifestation it took the form of overpopulation causing ecological disaster, social collapse and violent conflict. As Robert Kaplan put it in his 1994 article and later book The Coming Anarchy, “The crime and lawlessness of West Africa is a model of what future life could become everywhere.”

U.S. president Bill Clinton was so taken by Kaplan’s book that he recommended it to his staff, but its central thesis was too preposterous to scare people for long, and following the wars in the Balkans the threat shifted its shape to something else — ethnic cleansing. This was now the scourge of the future, the prevention of which required military action and larger defence budgets.

Ethnic conflict soon ran its course. It was too remote geographically, besides which, with the exception of the Rwandan genocide, there wasn’t actually that much of it. By the late 1990s, rogue states had supplanted it as the new danger, and North Korea featured as the occasional enemy in Western military exercises.

After 9/11, terrorism became the thing, along with so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” The gradual revelation that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on false premises did not dent the fearmongering one bit. In fact, the ensuing insurgency in Iraq pumped it up, for there was suddenly a new terrorist danger created by the invasion. “Failed states” replaced “rogue states” as the greatest threat to world peace.

After all this it is hard to know what the real threat is: big states, rogue states, failed states, large international terrorist organizations, individual homegrown radicals, weapons of mass destruction, lone lunatics with rifles or all of them simultaneously. Take your pick.

Today, though, failed states are competing with overly powerful ones to be global public enemy number one. In this regard, a report submitted to the Secretary-General of NATO in June 2014 by a panel of experts was quite intriguing. The report opened with a startling claim, saying: “In 2010, there were no clear and immediate threats to European security.… International terrorism persisted, but did not evolve into an existential threat. The direct impacts of new security risks … appeared distant.” In other words, all the previous claims of a more dangerous world were false. But not to worry, for the report went on to find a new threat — Russian aggression. Because of the Russians, the authors claimed, “Today, there can be no faith in the continuation of a relatively benign security context.” The report wrapped up with a section entitled, predictably, “The Emergence of a More Dangerous World.”

After all this it is hard to know what the real threat is: big states, rogue states, failed states, large international terrorist organizations, individual homegrown radicals, weapons of mass destruction, lone lunatics with rifles or all of them simultaneously. Take your pick. Whichever you choose, the outcome is the same — the threat in question is more deadly than any before it. In February 2012, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was born in 1952 during the Korean War and who was 10-years old when the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, declared, “I can’t impress upon you enough that in my personal military judgment, formed over 38 years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.” And Senator John McCain explained in July 2014 that the world is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime,” a remarkable statement for someone who was born in 1936, lived through the Second World War, and was later a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

If we are to believe all this, the world in 2014 is more dangerous than it was at the time of the previous more dangerous, which in turn was more dangerous than the more dangerous before that, and so on. It is frankly amazing that we are still here.

The reason that we are here is quite simple. The world is not more dangerous than 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, let alone than during the Cold War. Every statistical analysis of international conflict shows a sharp decline in conflict in the past 20 years. For nearly two decades professor Monty G. Marshall has been assembling data on international conflict for the University of Maryland and more recently the independent research organization Center for Systemic Peace. His statistics indicate that today there are fewer wars and fewer people being killed in wars than at any time since the 1950s.

Nor has terrorism replaced war as an existential threat. Terrorism peaked worldwide in the mid-1980s, and in North America a little earlier, around 1970 when groups such as the Front de Liberation du Québec in Canada and the Black Panthers and Weathermen in the U.S. were active. In fact, the incidence of terrorism within North America has declined dramatically in the past 40 years. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were unique in scale and although there was an increase in the number of terrorist incidents worldwide in 2013, this was due almost exclusively to the wars in Syria and Iraq. Five countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Nigeria — accounted for 80% of all terrorism-related deaths. If you live in Canada or the United States your chances of being killed by terrorism are almost zero. As Stephen Pinker concludes at the end of his 2012 book The Better Angels of Human Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, “we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”

Furthermore, there is more political stability than before: fewer revolutions, fewer coups and less crime. Since the end of the Cold War the number of autocracies worldwide has dramatically declined, while the number of democracies and anocracies (states somewhere between autocracy and democracy) has increased. Today’s international security environment is by all historical standards extraordinarily benign.

Statistics are dry and boring. Psychological research shows that they have little emotional impact, whereas highly publicized stories of terrorism and war hit home. This makes us exaggerate the danger posed by unusual events and distant conflicts, a tendency accentuated by the fact that bad news outsells good news. This has led to ill-considered policies with a number of negative outcomes, including: radicalization of elements of the Canadian population; costly and unnecessary wars; destabilization of various regions of the world; alienation from the West of the inhabitants of those regions; and curtailment of the civil liberties of Canadians.

The radicalization of a handful of Canadians is the most troublesome domestic outcome. Radicalization has many causes, and it cannot simply be reduced to a reaction to Western foreign policy. Nevertheless, foreign policy is a factor. A decade of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya has undoubtedly contributed to the problem, and increased the possibility of home-grown terrorism.

One could argue that this is just the price we pay for the achievement of important security objectives — that a slightly increased terrorist threat at home is compensated for by the elimination of a greater threat overseas. However, the price has been out of proportion to any benefit. We spent $10 billion fighting in Afghanistan and sacrificed 158 precious Canadian lives. Yet the Taliban continue to control parts of the country, while opium production is at an all-time high, and it’s hard to see how we have made either Afghanistan or Canada much safer.

The same could be said of the 2011 bombing of Libya. By removing a dictator from power we thought that we would turn Libya from a rogue state into a model member of the international community. Instead, we turned it into a region of chaos, which has exported terrorists southwards into Mali and eastwards into Syria and Iraq.

The anarchy that the West has regularly left in its wake in the past two decades has brought some to believe that we are creating chaos as a deliberate strategy. So many of our security policies so obviously fail to enhance our security that some people have concluded that they aren’t meant to. Russians are a prime example. Even many liberal Russians see the West’s support for the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014, as part of a Western plot to create a ring of anarchy around Russia.

To us this may seem like paranoid nonsense, but to them it is perfectly logical. It fits with what they see as a pattern of Western behaviour. For instance, in 2001, in order to pursue its plans for national missile defence, the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, antagonizing Russia. Now NATO is pushing hard for a missile defence system to defend Europe against the threat of Iranian nuclear missiles. Yet in 2007 a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2010, Lieutenant-General Ronald L. Burgess Jr., affirmed that “the bottom-line assessments of the [2007] NIE still hold true. We have not seen indication that the [Iranian] government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.”

Threat is a combination of capability and intent. While Iran could theoretically produce a nuclear weapon, it currently has no intent to do so, according to top U.S. security officials. Imagine how this looks to Moscow. Knowing that the supposed Iranian nuclear missile threat to Europe does not exist, the only explanation Russians can come up with for NATO’s actions is that the missile shield is directed against them. As Vladimir Putin told the Russian parliament in December 2013, “It was the Iranian nuclear program that at one time served as the main argument for deployment of the missile defence system. Now what’s happening? The Iranian nuclear program is going away, but the missile defence system stays.… [It] is a significant component of a strategic offensive potential.” By needlessly exaggerating the danger from rogue state nuclear missiles we have inflated the paranoia of a powerful and important country and strengthened the political hand of its leader. We are worse off as a result.

At the same time, by inflating threats we are harming ourselves at home. The past decade has witnessed a significant expansion in the size and budgets of both the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Communications Security Establishment Canada. Canadians pay for this in more than just higher taxes. Edward Snowden’s revelations indicate that innocent Canadian citizens cannot feel certain that their private movements and communications are only being tracked with good cause. And sadly, we cannot trust that our intelligence and security agencies will always act responsibly, as shown by a 2013 Federal Court judgment that CSIS had breached its duty of candour by failing to reveal the full scope of its activities when seeking a warrant. Had the Canadian government strengthened oversight of its security agencies, there might be less cause for alarm, but instead it has done the opposite, abolishing the position of the inspector-general of CSIS in 2012. Given the decline in domestic and international terrorism, it is not obvious that the increased powers and budgets of our police, security and intelligence services, and the resultant reduction in the civil liberties of Canadians, are justified.

The world has not become a “darker place” filled with threats. If it seems that way, it is because we keep our eyes half shut and bump into things we can’t see properly. We live in a particularly safe region of a world, which, compared with all of recorded history, is remarkably peaceful. If we were to open our eyes we would find it easier to navigate around the real obstacles to an even more peaceful future.

C2C Journal

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in the Winter 2014 edition of C2C Journal (C2CJournal.ca).

Article Link

 

[Edward Campbell]

I'm not so sure that a great many of us are not confusing, or, at least, mixing "danger" and "fear."

I'm inclined to the view that circa 1900 France's very legitimate fear of Germany translated into a danger that France and Russia in trying to encircle Germany could and ultimately would provoke a great war. Germany's aims, in Europe and globally, were comprehensible but they were only likely to be met at the expense of French and, to a lesser degree, Russian interests. The French were afraid, and I repeat that they had reason to be afraid: Germany was big, powerful and willing to flex its political, economic and military muscle.

We ended the "war to end all wars" with an aborted "peace process" that eschewed peace in favour of punishment and, by French diplomatic and political error piled upon error, guaranteed a second, even worse war. Once again French fear coupled with British confusion and American isolationism combined to turn a reasonable, well founded fear into a real danger.

I don't believe that the world is all that dangerous for us - the sophisticated, rich, US led West and Asia, but I do believe that we are afraid of the strange, foreign, almost medieval Islamist 'world' and I fear that we will, yet again, turn our fears, however valid they may be, into a real danger that does not and need not exist.