Define “classicist” for me.
Never mind. I like Victor Davis Hanson’s editorials, or maybe I love to hate to love to hate them. They’re nice, warm, and fuzzy. There’s a consistency that’s blindingly Wonder-breadish — just smash me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and remove the crust, please. He basically writes the same editorial over and over again, which makes plenty of sense: he’s paralleling Bush, who gives the same speech over and over again.
Take it away, Victor Davis Hanson, World Class Classicist!!
The first throw-in-the-towel remark, however, did not come from Howard Dean or John Murtha — but from Horace Greeley about the Civil War during the depressing summer of 1864. And the second quote is Douglas MacArthur’s bleak assessment not long after the Chinese Red Army crossed the Yalu River in the autumn of 1950.
Similar despair could be recalled from the winter of 1776, the Imperial German offensive of March 1918 or the early months of 1942 after Pearl Harbor and the Allies’ loss of the Philippines and Singapore.
America has not fought a war when at some point the news from the battlefield did not evoke a frenzy of recriminations both abroad and at home.
After the carnage of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Petersburg in 1864, the conventional wisdom about the Civil War was that the bumbling Abraham Lincoln could never win re-election. Instead, all summer the veteran Gen. George McClellan assured the Northern populace that there was no hope of military victory.
In November 1950, after Americans were sent scurrying southward by the Chinese, most pundits wrote off Korea as lost — before the unexpected counteroffensives of Gen. Matthew Ridgeway saved the Seoul government by the next spring.
We can derive three historical lessons that are relevant to our present finger-pointing over Iraq.
The first historical lesson that is relevant is that we did indeed “throw in the towel” in the Korean War, after we fought our way back to the war’s beginning at the 38th Parallel. Eisenhower made a truce agreement that Truman observed would have gotten a President Truman or President Stevenson (ie: the Democrats then being blasted by Joseph McCarthy and then being accused of “losing China”) blasted for “appeasement” and “being soft on Communism”. The parallel with us in Iraq is simply: sometimes you can get something other than a “defeat” or “victory” in a war — and sometimes that is just a’okay, and to some degree we’re going to have to be “appeasing” the Iraqi Insurgents (as apart from appeasing terrorists) whose nation it is. (Hopefully, getting them to vote and vote and vote again will gallop us “half way toward them”. I note something that our Classicist Historian forgets to mention in his happy news: before the elections, Iraqi leaders came together and agreed that Reaching out to the Sunni Arab community, Iraqi leaders called for Iraq’s opposition has a “legitimate right” of resistance, which is for the bulk of them a political gambit and attempt at getting Votes — meet the Iraqi Wedge Issue: “Fighting Coalition Troops”.)
The second historical lesson is that under a President Victor Davis Hanson, every war should be fought to the end, whatever “end” means, and any war should be fought. We should resume fighting in Vietnam right this minute!
The third historical lesson is that Woodrow Wilson is an a$$hole.
Most today revere Lincoln and Marshall, along with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who weathered unimaginable slurs. A Gen. McClellan or Sen. Jenner — who opportunistically piled on when news from the front was bad — was mostly forgotten when things inevitably improved.
The same will probably be true of Iraq. The election this week will prove the most successful yet. The Iraqi army gets bigger — and better. The Pentagon now does not fret over the need for more American troops, but agrees that evolving events on the ground will allow measured withdrawal.
I draw your attention to the word “inevitably”. What is inevitable? Why are things inevitable? Are things inevitable only for America? Was winning the Korean War straight into Red China “inevitable”, or was stopping it back at the 38th Parallel and crafting an uneasy truce the “inevitable” conclusion of the Korean War? From the point of view of the actors of the carnage in the Sudan: is winning that one inevitable? Or is history narrowly disclosed to a closed system of America — and there are no parallels to the rise and fall of previous great powers, or the existence of other nations in the world past and present? (And this paragraph, as clumsily written as it is, drives at the central problem of why I find Victor Davis Hanson’s repeating mantra of editorials tedious.)
I mention one more thing about the Iraqi elections. In the 1990s, you would hear Republicans (and I did listen to some Rush Limbaugh at one time) murmur on how James Carville was out there helping the Labor Party in Israel get Barak elected, or Yeltsin re-elected. Keen insight into the nature of American hegenomy. But they’ve lost their savvy with regards to the Iraqi election, and “Allawai Fever” which is being fed into the Iraqis from our government.
BEN NELSON OF NEBRASKA
