Classicist who captured the White House
Giles Whittell meets the hawkish academic calling the shots in Washington's war on terror
Last month a tall, strong-looking man approaching his 50th birthday woke up in an old farmhouse in central California, put on city clothes and began the long journey to Washington. A classics professor at one of America's least highly regarded universities, he was off to the Pentagon to talk to senior US defence staff about why so many of their foreign bases become liabilities in time of war.
He had no military experience of his own, no special access to intelligence and no new research to offer, but every confidence he would be listened to.
Welcome to the curious world of Victor Davis Hanson, scholar, raisin farmer and the Bush Administration's favourite don.
Hanson's expertise is in ancient Greek warfare; specifically in the success of heavily armed Greek citizen soldiers against allcomers in the 5th century BC. His contribution to world affairs since 2001 has been rather broader. Extrapolating from the Greek experience (and one or two battles since), he has told willing listeners in very high places that Western armies are singularly lethal thanks to consensual Western governments and a long tradition of what he calls civic militarism. Furthermore, he says, America's enemies today are no more rational than Xerxes after Thermopylae. Their battle cries are phoney and they deserve the fate of the Persian navy at Salamis — annihilation.
The Hanson story takes a maverick Hellenist from the boondocks who also happens to be a registered Democrat, and in a few months transforms him into a darling of the Right. He is invited to the Bush and Cheney Christmas parties. He addresses the White House staff, dines with the Vice-President and ends up perhaps the most influential voice to have emerged from American academia since 9/11.
It's all true and could easily be spun to embarass almost everyone involved: a White House determined to launch a pre-emptive war seeks intellectual underpinning for its plans, but gets little from an East Coast university elite that it mistrusts anyway. So it casts its net wider and comes up with a sunburnt classicist ready to reach back as far as it takes to find precedent and moral arguments for an operation widely considered unprecedented and amoral.
Add a little background — stinging attacks by Hanson on his fellow classicists and a literary vendetta against a woman who claimed he might be the Unabomber — and the Bushies' favourite historian begins to look a little scary. Except that none of this would be quite fair. Far from being co-opted by the White House, Hanson has thrust himself into the debate unleashed by 9/11 through sheer force of argument and an astonishing ability to crank out words.
His rise to prominence began three weeks before the September attacks with the publication of Why the West Has Won — essays on nine epic battles, from Salamis in 480BC to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam. Hanson opened the book, which seeks to demonstrate a link between consensual government and military lethality, by insisting it was about efficacy, not morality. Then al-Qaeda struck, and he seems to have been seized almost bodily by a need to write about the moral implications of the attacks. He sat down at home that afternoon to write, and produced at least one substantial opinion piece a day for 72 days, until the al-Qaeda stronghold of Tora Bora in Afghanistan was demolished and the fires at Ground Zero finally put out.
"I tried to write from a non-East Coast, non-postmodernist point of view, as somebody who lived in a different world, a different contemporary world," Hanson says. "But my intellectual world was different, too, because there are certain people I had read — Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, in particular — that I preferred over the modern thinkers." He was also, he confirms, extremely angry: "I didn't like the idea that somebody for no reason came over here and killed 3,000 of my fellow citizens at peace, and I thought it was a very different thing than trying to kill somebody in a war." The key words are "for no reason". He refused to take seriously the arguments concerning 9/11's origins advanced by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and others on the Left, whether these involved oppression, exploitation or callous disregard for Islamic sensitivities. All missed the point, he says, and by last winter he was in a position to tell the Vice-President why.
At a private three-hour dinner with Dick Cheney and his wife, Hanson says that he "tried to suggest that this post-Marxist idea that wars are the product of material grievance or clear-cut exploitation, unfortunately, is not true; that so many wars in antiquity and in the modern world start because of perceived grievances only. They deal with irrational elements like fear and honour, and we don't necessarily have to believe they have any basis in fact."
Phoney grievances, Hanson told Cheney, have a way of being revealed as such by crushing military defeat. Germans no longer yearn for the expansion offered by Lebensraum ("living space"). Japan no longer fears it will die without unfettered access to Chinese raw materials. Argentina no longer claims the Falklands as vital to its national survival. Yet some in the Middle East still claim that not a single Jew should be allowed on the West Bank. Why?
Other historians besides Hanson have emboldened this White House to wage war, pre-emptively if necessary. Eliot Cohen, author of Supreme Command, heard that his book had been read by Bush because of its praise for Clemenceau and Churchill, who knew when to overrule over-cautious generals and either fire them or send them into battle.
But nobody else has enjoyed Hanson's access to the Administration, and nobody else has delivered with such force and stamina two key messages: "We can do it" and "We are right". In light of which it is worth quoting Hanson at length on what he sees as the Arab world's desperately conflicted view of Western culture, affluence and know-how. "If you're a wahhabi mullah and you want American antibiotics for your daughter's strep throat," he begins, "do you deny her them because that's the country that gives the world Jerry Springer? If you're a Saudi sheikh and you want a heart bypass or Viagra, do you go without because it's contaminated with Western decadence? I don't think so. It's as if they don't realise that the whole supporting infrastructure for brain surgery or chemotherapy is a product of a complex system of secularism, rationalism, tolerance, sexual equality, consensual government and free expression. That's why we do brain surgery and they don't.
They want brain surgery, but they don't want any of the other stuff. They've tried for 50 years to cherry-pick the West and it doesn't work too well; they end up hating themselves and hating us, and what American policy now says is, 'We understand the problem, but we can't do much about it. It's got to be yours'. But we are going to do one thing. The next son-of-a-bitch who comes over here and kills 3,000 Americans is going to be in big big trouble."
By the time we meet in carefully maintained shade behind his 100-year-old clapboard house, Hanson has already had a busy morning. He has appeared on television with the Governor of Colorado, done two radio interviews, mown the lawn, inspected the family raisin-packing operation in a neighbouring hangar, and begun preparing for a History Channel interview.
The only subject he betrays any nervousness about is being portrayed as a sun-baked nut. "Don't do that," he says after the tape recorder has been switched off. Then, for the second time, he tells the story of a Los Angeles Times interviewer who came up for lunch in January and was made to look silly by trying to make Hanson look silly for predicting the major fighting in Iraq would be over in four or five weeks.
"I wasn't too far off," Hanson muses. But what about America's continuing losses since May? No worse than in Austria after the surrender of the Wehrmacht, he insists. Weapons of mass destruction? We'll find 'em. Saddam Hussein? We'll find him, too, and kill him. Media handwringing about the miserable chaos in postwar Iraq? Hysterical and appallingly short-sighted. This stuff happens after wars.
Hanson is not a nut. He is a formidable advocate of the bloody nose as an instrument of US foreign policy. Its time seems to have come, and so has his. His output recalls that of Norman Stone and Timothy Garton Ash during the fall of Communism. He is everywhere, obsessive and, on his own blunt terms, often unanswerable.
His use of history can be reckless. He is too ready, for example, to liken Iraq in 2003 to Europe in 1945 as a way of rationalising the mess in Baghdad, as if Operation Iraqi Freedom was somehow comparable to the global convulsion of the Second World War.
But he is on target too often to ignore, especially on the widening gulf between Europe and America since the Cold War. Americans, he suggests, are "Thucydidean realists who believe the nature of man doesn't change and that war, unfortunately, is a tragedy that won't leave us", while "the Europeans in their intellectual arrogance suddenly believed that because they had this little hiatus of 50 years they had remade the nature of man". The Cold War was a blip. American deterrence kept the peace. Now, without the threat of mutually assured destruction, Europeans can't agree on anything much.
Hanson's scorn for France and Germany's "bickering", especially their anti-American bickering, is bottomless, and he demonises Europe as a bloc with Britain the honourable exception — with as much relish and as little subtlety as he does "the Arab street" and its leaders who, in his view, are either irredeemably autocratic or — worse — false friends.
Hanson is not saying America is perfect, just that it's a darn sight better than the rest of the world. It's sick of being taken for granted and sick of being made to feel responsible for the rest of the world's envy. "It's a raw society," he says, handing me a bag of raisins as I leave. "It's a very exciting society, and Europeans don't have a clue about it."
GEORGE BUSH'S READING LIST
Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson, published in Britain as Why the West Has Won.
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third
Crusade by James Reston.Supreme Command by Eliot Cohen. Four leaders who rode roughshod over timid generals.
April 1865, The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik. The closing stages of the Civil War.
The Bible.
[Posted 2003/10/03]
Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
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