CHESTER W.

NIMITZ
MEMORIAL LECTURES IN
NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS
The Nimitz Memorial Lectureship, established in 1985 in honor of Fleet
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, each year brings to the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, a distinguished scholar, professional military person, or
government ofcial, either domestic or foreign, for a series of lectures on
national security affairs.
 War, Ancient and Modern:
What the Conicts of the Past Teach Us about the
Fighting of Today
Victor Davis Hanson

Sponsored by
Departments of Military Education
Berkeley Public Policy Press
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
International Standard Book number
978-0-87772-422-3
0-87772-422-9
2007 by the Regents of the University of California
Contents

Brief Remarks and Question and Answer Session with 1

NROTC Midshipmen

Transcript of a lecture delivered by Victor Davis Hanson: 27

Lessons from the Peloponnesian War

Transcript of a lecture delivered by Victor Davis Hanson: 51

The Timeless Laws of War

About the Author 73

Brief Remarks and Question and Answer Session with
NROTC Midshipmen

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SIDNEY F. MITCHELL: Welcome. Most

of you have already had the opportunity to read some of our speakers
articles and books. You will get a chance tonight to hear him lecture. Vic-
tor Davis Hanson is currently at Stanford University as a senior fellow
with the Hoover Institution, and he will be there for the remainder of this
year. He is a professor at California State University Fresno, and a distin-
guished and accomplished author. Ive talked to him a lot, and I know you
will have lots of questions. Dr. Hanson over the last couple of nights has
had the opportunity to address some very relevant and pertinent topics.
He is informed on a lot of things going on in the world, not just military
issues, not just the evolution of war, although those are some of the topics
hes spoken on and will speak on, including a lot of things weve talked
about here in our naval science classes. Weve talked about how national
military strategies play a role in the military, national interests, and an as-
sortment of topics. Please feel free to ask questions of him this afternoon.
Sir, its your turn.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Id be happy to answer any questions. Just

a few brief remarks on something that youre probably asked a lot by your
friends, your parents, and your associates: why do you need a military
in the rst place? Apparently the criticism against what youre doing is
that you serve as the tip of the spear for an exploitive United States. Re-
member something about the United States. We havent taken anybodys

This lecture was given on March 8, 2006.

1
2 War, Ancient and Modern

lands since 1898. That was the Philippine insurrection, and we gave the
land back to the Philippines. Can anybody tell me of any land the United
States has taken? Id like to hear it. We went into Iraq, and the price of oil
was $28.00 per barrel. Its now right around $64.00. And the oil, if you
remember, was signed over by Saddam to three agencies: Oil for Food,
which we found out was a $50 billion extortion program; the Russians;
and the French who had worked out the most sweetheart deal in the his-
tory of the petroleum industry. Seventy-ve cents of every dollar that was
pumped went to them. Now that is void, and oil is under the auspices of
the Iraqi government.
So keep these things in mind and remember that if you look through-
out history at the role of the democratic military and the state, if you didnt
exist, something else would exist that would be far worse. Its the nature
of man, its human character to be acquisitive, to be governed by passions
such as honor and status and pride and envy and jealousy. When humans,
being what they are, sense an opportunity or weakness, they act on it. If
theres not a deterrent or restraint from that, then we get chaos.
If the United States were to, as Europe has done, disband its military
and suggest the world is going to be governed or adjudicated by reason
and dialogue, then somebody else who didnt necessarily believe in all
that would step forward. And were seeing that in the case of Europe. At
the end of the Cold War in 1989, they cut defense spending from 3% down
to 1.2% of GDP, dismantled their military, dismantled their military tech-
nological programs, and now we have a continent larger than the United
States, and an EU population of 450 million people that has very little
military capability . They say that the world is to be subject to the Inter-
national Court, and the UN and they suggest that all of these bodies will
be guided by reason. People like you represent their primordial brains or
reptilian past and we no longer need that anymore.
That would be wonderful, and Im all for it because we could spend
the money on everything from rapid transit to increased health care as they
have done. But if you look at the period since the Cold War, what do you
do about Darfur? Or what did you do about Rwanda? Better yet, within a
three-hour ight from Frankfurt, hundreds of thousands of people in the
Balkans were butchered in the heart of southeastern Europe. The Europe-
ans didnt do a thing for years. The worst story is the Dutch peacekeepers of
Srebrenica, when they heard Milosevics men killing 7,000 Bosnian men,
women, and children, they put their earphones on high so they wouldnt
 Victor Davis Hanson 3

have to hear the shrieking and shouting. The point is that if theres a vac-
uum and we do not have a military, given our nature, somebodys going
to step forward to take advantage of that. Now we see Europe petried
by some of the former Soviet Republics, by terrorism, by unassimilated
Muslim populations, wondering what exactly is their relationship vis--vis
the United States.
What happens when you dont have a military and the nature of so-
ciety and man has not changed? Someone will step into the void, and if
you want protection you have to mortgage your autonomy in certain ways.
The best example of that is this tragic schizophrenia we see in Europe,
to compensate for the fact that they do not have any military, to compen-
sate for the fact that the United States has bases in Spain, Italy, Greece,
England, and Germany to protect them, and to compensate for the fact
that there may soon be a real crisis when theres an Iranian missile point-
ed at Frankfurt or a former Soviet Republic that has a nuclear device, or
an Al Qaeda bomb that comes into Italy, Greece, or North Africa. They
will always depend on the United States, whether that may be a C-130
bringing in supplies or the First Marine Division coming in to shore up
things. When the USS Vincennes or USS Reagan are patrolling the Medi-
terraneanthat dependency will always create insecurity and anger that
is manifested in anti-Americanism. That is natural when a proud nation
that has the resources and the condence in its values does not want to be
involved in its own defense. So whether you know it or not, the presence
of a well-disciplined and technologically adept military saves us from that
dependency and actually keeps the peace. Every time in our own history
when we have disbanded or attenuated our forces, whether it was in 1930s
or the late 1890s or the or 1970s, somebody has stepped into that vacuum.
Until I see that people are all on the same page of the Enlightenment, and
we can all be UC Berkeley students and solve all our problems by not by
beating each other up in the free speech area but by talking or shouting at
each other, we will need a military. But I dont see that happening, at least
in relationships with one state to another.
Now lets go to the questions. Im willing to answer anything about
military history, the contemporary status of the military, the current war in
the Middle Eastany questions you have, our relations with other coun-
tries, any doubts, or questions you have about your own military service.
Id be happy to offer some guidance if anybody has questions.
4 War, Ancient and Modern

MIDN 2/C MICHAEL YOST: Sir, I just nished your book about Ger-
manic culture and, in my opinion, it effectively traces the roots of some
aspects of the western military dating back to the Hellenic traditions in
Greece. What do you think made those adaptations possible in Greece that
instigated the Western tradition?

HANSON: Well, when you say Western civilization, we mean govern-

ment by consent, presence of a middle class, capitalism, economic liberty,
religious tolerance, and secularism. We could even use the word rational-
ism, which you would use to explain natural phenomenon by using logic
rather than superstition or religion. Where did that come from? We could
trace it back to our own founding fathers. We could go to the French En-
lightenment, John Locke and the British Enlightenment, Voltaire, Montes-
quieu. We could go back from their way of thinking to the Florentine Re-
naissance, people like Da Vinci and Machiavelli. We could go back to the
medieval tradition of theology with St. Thomas Aquinas, even back to St.
Augustine. We could go to Roman thinkerslike Tacitusand then back
to Greece, of course, where it startedPlato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sopho-
clesand then it stops. By that, I mean there is nothing before the seventh
century B.C., before Homers Iliad. There might be a poem of Gilgamesh
or a Near Eastern text, but there was very little else anywhere in the world.
So we start that tradition with Greece, and then the question is, why did
it start in Greece? Its a hard question. I wrote a book called The Other
Greeks trying to explain it. I think it has something to do with the sev-
enth century B.C., with a lot of people in small, isolated valleys that were
planting certain crops and wanting to protect property. They were small
communities that did not, any longer, want to be subject to a tribal order or
a big chief or a bureaucratic state. They gained title to ten or fteen acres
and planted trees and vines, and they said, You know what? This is mine.
How can I protect it? How can I give it to my children? How do I pro-
tect my wealth? Do I need a constitution? If a bunch of us are alike, then
well start to vote on it and well make laws and well discuss them, and
then well ght shoulder to shoulder to protect our land. Thats where it
started. It was a desire to protect property, to decentralize political power,
and to have an economic basis that was the beginning of capitalism or free
enterprise. Private property, the invention of moneyall of that demanded
political status and protection. I wish I could tell you that Western civiliza-
tion started with the idea of free speech when somebody in Greece got up
 Victor Davis Hanson 5

on a rostrum and said, Im going to say whatever I want against the gods
or the king. It did, but that came later. The real motive was simple: I went
out and carved that hillside and I terraced that land, and Ive got wheat,
and Ive got barley, and its mine. I dont want anybody to take it, and I
need a place where I can register it, and I need a deed. I need a court sys-
tem. I need somebody that will honor it when Im dead and I need to pass
it on to my children. I dont want it to be conscated by the government.
I dont want to have to give half of my produce to local warlords. That is
what caused a constitutional government. The same kind of chaos we see
today in Afghanistan or Rwanda or places in South America existed then.
The remedy to that was this Western model. The biggest cause of poverty
in the world, which seems to me to be prevalent in Asia, Latin America,
and Mexico, is the inability to own property and to have it respected and
protected from the state. So if you buy a house in Mexico, or Bolivia, or
in Baghdad, its not certain that your investment will be protected. Theres
not a title search, theres not a county register where theres protection
against conscation. Theres not a legal system that will treat you fairly
compared to someone that has more capital. Thats an astonishing devel-
opment in the history of civilization or in Western culture.

MIDN 4/C ROBERT EBERHART: What do you think about the conten-
tion about the current war in the Middle East, specically that it is not so
much a clash between a very small, isolated minority of radicals attacking
Western ideals, but a more general clash of civilizations as evidenced per-
haps by the recent riots resulting from the Danish cartoon?

HANSON: I see the drift of your comments but I would advise everybody
that if this was 1940, we would say that we could not live with Germany,
because they had a history in 1870 with their attack in France that they did
again in 1914. There was just something about Germans that was fanati-
cal. They never were colonized by Romans. They were on the other side
of the Danube or the Rhine, and they were hopeless. You dont say that
today. If we had this conversation in 1943, wed say you cant live with the
Japanese. Theyve got an Asian mentality. They believe in bushido, Zen
Buddhists, whatever you want to say about them. Theyre warlike people.
They always have been. They have this samurai code. Theyre very incor-
rigible, and yet, our closest allies today are the Japanese.
6 War, Ancient and Modern

If we had said this about the Arab world in 1955, wed say that we
cant deal with the Arab world. Its tribal, and the problem with the Arab
world is that its secular and atheist. Theres some movement called Pan
Arabism, and theyve got these nuts called Nasser, and the Baathists. Re-
member the Baathists started out not as a religious group but as secularists,
and weve got Communism taking over in the Middle East. Its trying to
go into Afghanistan. Its trying to go into Syria. The Soviet Union sup-
plied all the armies of Arab secularists. Saddam Hussein got his start, in
Baathism a pro-Communist, almost atheistic party. Remember Yasser Ara-
fat? Remember, we said he was a big Islamicist. He was a complete atheist
and a Communist student and was trained in Moscow in terrorism, and
Mr. Abbas, the current prime minister, wrote his dissertation in Moscow
about the theory that there was no Holocaust. My point being that whether
its Fascism or Communism or militarism or whatever it is, and now its
Islamicism, it captivates a lot of people in the Middle East.
This was once true for Germany or Italy or Japan, and most people
in the world, well, maybe you guys are different, but most people have
no ideology. They have one ideology as humansI want to succeed at
the least possible trouble to myself. In 1941, when Germany was ready to
invade the Soviet Union, they went to Spain, Turkey, France, Sweden, Ro-
mania, saying, How many of you are Nazis? Everybodys a Nazi. Why
not? Germany knocked off France in six weeks. Its taken over the whole
globe. Its now in its rst week in Russia; its gone hundreds of miles in
one week.
Flash forward to 1945 when the Nazi party is destroyed, Germanys
destroyed, the cities are in shambles, anybody who allied themselves with
Germany is nearly destroyed. Turkeys isolated for being neutral. Francos
isolated for being neutral. The French Vichies are being rounded up and
often shot. Fascists in every eastern European country are being killed, and
how many are Nazi? Nobody. What changed? Did Nazi doctrine change
and suddenly people said, Well, you know I was a Nazi but then Rib-
bentrop or somebody changed that little bit of their constitution, and count
me out. No.
So a longwinded answer to your question is that most people have no
ideology. Muslims in the world vote; whether thats in Malaysia or Indo-
nesia or Turkey or India; theyre not really much of a problem. Where they
are a problem is in the Middle East where its autocratic, undemocratic,
fascistic, and these dictators have made a holy bargain with terrorists to
 Victor Davis Hanson 7

deect their own failures on the United States and Israel. Then these ter-
rorists get a blank check from the likes of Saddam Hussein, their own
families, or even the Pakistani intelligence, to do what they can as long as
they dont blame their own dictators.
Most people in these Muslim countries are poor and frustrated with-
out a vote. And they dont have an ideologytheyre Muslims, of course.
But when they see Saddam Hussein take over Kuwait, they think hes
the wave of the future and they accommodate themselves. When they see
Osama knock down the World Trade Center, they think thats pretty good.
You should have listened to people in Pakistan. If you go back, one of the
most fascinating things is that if you look at the televised interviews of the
Madrassas in Pakistan in September 2001and theyre on recordevery-
body wanted to go to Madrassas, everybody wanted to go help the Taliban.
They were all hyped up because of 9/11. Then the US Air Force went in
and dropped an amazing amount of tonnage.We took out the Taliban in
seven weeks, and everybody went back to Pakistan eeing Afghanistan.
These were people who said they wanted to die in Afghanistan. But they
went back to Pakistan and said, Dont go over there.
What Im trying to get at is that we could beat the hardcore Islamic
Fascists and humiliate them. Then theres not going to be a lot of people
in the Middle East who want to ally themselves with them, as we saw in
Afghanistan and as we see in Iraq. We could not function today in Iraq if
there were millions of people who would not vote and would not join the
security forces; so, it depends on whether you win or lose, to be frank.
If your cause is just, thats good, but youve got to have a just cause,
and youve got to win. If we lose in Iraq, the Islamic Fascists are going to
go in the next day, and just like the communists in Vietnam, theyre going
to go in to kill every woman reformer, theyre going to kill every liberal
Democrat, theyre going to kill anybody they can thats allied with the
Americans and then everybody in Lebanon who said that they did not like
Hezbollah or they didnt like Syrians.
They are going to say, I never did that. Theyre probably going to
bring those targeted back in, and everybody in Egypt who has sought re-
form from all this is going to say, I didnt do that. All of the people in
Kuwait who said that women could drive are going to say, I never said
that. And then the people of Afghanistan will say, Well, the Taliban was
not that bad because they think the wave of the future is the Islamic Fas-
cist.
8 War, Ancient and Modern

So we have to demonstrate that: (A) we have the character to usher

in reform and economic prosperity and (B) its a very, very dangerous
thing to take on the United States because not only will you go down, but
everybody who allied themselves with you is going to go down, and thats
what is at stake in Iraq right now. We stabilize Iraq; we stabilize Afghan-
istan; we have a consensual government and economic prosperity. The
model would probably be something like Kurdistan, which is booming
even though theyre all Muslims, and even parts of southern Iraq around
the capital at Basra. If that can work in the way that South Korea worked
and the way that Japan worked and the way that Taiwan worked when they
were all written off as hopeless, then we will win this war.
In two or three years, if we get out [of Iraq] before its stabilized then
you guys are all going to be in combat for the next ten years, in my way
of thinking, everyone of you, because if we stumble in Iraq, believe me,
somebodys going to be pushing around Taiwan and somebodys going to
be pushing around South Korea. Japans going to doubt us, the Philippines
are going to wonder what to do, the Chinese are going to take advantage of
this, the Iranians are going to take advantage of this, and were not going
to have a friend in the world.
I wish I could tell you of somebody who is idealistic. Most people
instead are opportunistic. They want to do the good thing, but theyll only
do the good thing if they think it has the least risk of punishment and pri-
vation. You cant ask most people to go out on the forefront and stand for
liberty and freedom and prosperity when they think theyre going to get
killed and that were not going to be there to help them.
I know thats a bitter pill but that seems to be the way history works.
I wish I could tell you that there are all these people with these principles.
Ten percent of the people have ideologies, and the other 90% are follow-
ers. We know that from our own revolution. Most people were sympa-
thetic to the British. If you take away ten days of the American revolution
and turn the outcome the other way, then Jefferson and Washington would
have been hung, and today wed all be living in something like Canada
and the evil people in our textbooks would be these insurrectionists, the
Yankee capitalists, like Hamilton and Franklin and Jefferson. We call them
our forefathers because they won. I hate to say that but thats the truth, and
that war was very close. They almost didnt pull it off.
 Victor Davis Hanson 9

BUCKEY: Sir, in Iraq would the divisions between the factions be a good
thing for us and for the area of Kurdistan, or Shiites and the Sunni?

HANSON: That seems to be an increasingly asked question. I was asked

it at lunch today. The person that I traced that to is Leslie Gelb, a member
of a national security think-tank on foreign relations and wished to trisect
the country in a manner that Yugoslavia was divided up. I dont think we
should for about ve reasons. One, Im not sure the sectarian differences
are much more than was true in Afghanistan. Two, if you trisect the coun-
try, Im sure Turkey will invade because independent Kurdistan has terri-
torial claims in Turkey and Iran, and therell be a move for those countries
to join it and youll have a war with Turkey. Kurdistan is a model of suc-
cess now, and that will be in danger. Iran will claim the south with its oil as
a protectorate. Kurdistan will be invaded. The Sunnis will ally themselves
with the Gulf Wahhabis so youll only intensify the existing violence, but
if you can nd a way to keep Iraq together under a consensual government,
those undeniable differences will be aired through a constitutional frame-
work rather than shooting.
At least theres hope. Ive only been to Iraq once, and I want to go in
May again; not everybody says theyre a Shiite or a Turk or a Turkoman
or a Sunni. Like us, they have mixed parentages and religions. All of you
know people who marry outside their so-called ethnic group or race. The
same is true in Iraq. You will meet Iraqis who are from the ex-Baathist
party who were atheists. You will meet Iraqis whose parents are Shia and
Sunni. Youll meet Iraqis who are Kurd and Iraqi.
What we dont want to do is what we did in Yugoslavia where we have
broken up Yugoslavia into bickering states. Iraq may or may not work but
its a long way, after ten years, from resolving itself. So I think theres
hope that we can keep it together. The rst thing thats going to happen is
that theres going to be an invasion by the Turks. The Turks lost 15,000
people last decade to Kurdish militias, and youll probably have some kind
of strange alliance probably between Iran and Turkey to stop Kurdistan.
I think the United States has a moral obligation to protect Kurdistan,
so I can see all sorts of scenarios. One thing to remember about war is that
there are no good solutions. Being on the verge of war is bad and worse.
10 War, Ancient and Modern

MIDSHIPMEN 4/C TAO CHENG: What do you think about the notion
that democracy cannot be forced upon some people because theyve been
used to certain kinds of rules for so long?

HANSON: Thats a common argument.Can anybody here tell me of a

spontaneous but peaceful revolution that was Democratic.

MIDSHIPMEN 4/C TYLER STEED: Sir, the Ming Jung movement?

HANSON: When? Give me a date. It didnt lead to a democracy though,

did it? Im talking about a democratic revolution that was well apart from
war. Yes? There are a few examples.

MIDSHIPMEN 1/C DAVID TURNER: The Soviet Union revolution.

HANSON: Yes, you could say that of some of the Eastern revolutions like
the former Soviet Union but Im not sure that would have been possible
without the Cold War. There was pressure in the Cold War that bankrupted
and forced the Soviet Union to break apart, but they could have never done
that without the Soviet Union being exhausted. Another one. . . .

MIDSHIPMEN 2/C FRANK GOLBECK: Sir, perhaps India?

HANSON: Yes. India became democratic, but a million people were lost
in the War of 1947 between Pakistan and India and the withdrawal of the
British. Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany. What Im trying to suggest is that,
in the Athenian revolution, the Roman republic, the Venetian republic, de-
mocracy is probably the least worst or least bad of all the bad alternatives,
but its not natural to turn over power to the average person because were
not born into this world equally. In this room, if I go check your SAT
scores or if I look at your parents net worth, or I look at how many pounds
each of you can bench-press, I can nd ways to distinguish each of you,
and I can use certain criteria that will exclude some and favor others. But
the idea that Im looking at you and youre all sitting randomly in seats
and we have rank, of course, but youre basically equal and you have equal
say, and more importantly, you believe, no matter what your gender or
your race or your religion or your wealth, youre just as equal as somebody
 Victor Davis Hanson 11

else. Thats a rare idea, and most people will ght you and kill you to stop
it in order to have power.
Look at the Middle East. Theres a phrase in Latin, and I taught Latin
and Greek for twenty years, and it comes in handy once in a while. Its
called cui bono. C-U-I B-O-N-O. To whose good? And what the Ro-
mans meant by that is that for every time you had a question, it was pref-
aced by who benets and who loses? So who loses in the Middle East if
there is a democracy in Iraq and theres secularization, in the sense that
people have their religion but the governments not theocratic and its not
authoritarian?
Well, you can go down the line. The local Imam who tells everybody
that youre going to live by Sharia law and get some money from the
government, well hes out. Hes still going to be there but hes not going
to have the level of inuence. A patriarch of the family who sits at the
table with twelve children, who says, Youre going to marry this person,
youre going to marry that person. Suddenly women say, No, Im not.
Im going to make a free choice of my own. The father who says, I am
the father. I am the head of my tribe. You are going to be a leather maker.
The son says, No, I want to be an engineer.
These people have a lot to lose so its to their good that we fail, that
Westernization fails, and why or to whos good is it for us? Well, you have
a system that works suddenly when somebody says, I hate the United
States and its the cause of all evil in the world and then somebody writes
a letter to the paper and says, No, its not. I disagree. And you say, Oh
no, its not. Yes, it is. And they ght it out in the media or in talk shows
or in private conversations. Its a way of venting without creating fanati-
cism. So the stakes are very high. If you add oil to the equation, and terror-
ism, it can get to be very volatile.

MIDSHIPMAN 2/C JOSEPH COLANGELO: I wanted to ask how so

many times it seems in history that the truth about situations, especially
our current situation, doesnt come out until twenty, thirty years later. Its
a very serious thought to think that we really wont make sense of whats
going on now until later in our lives.

HANSON: I think thats absolutely true.

12 War, Ancient and Modern

MIDSHIPMAN 2/C JOSEPH COLANGELO: What do you suggest is

the best way to get a more accurate vision of our world? What would be a
good source?

HANSON: You know, thats a good question. Were still ghting over
the Peloponnesian war 2,500 years ago. You know a war that we dont
know anything about? Can you imagine that a million people were killed
between 1980 and 1986 on the Iraqi-Iran border? Nobody knows any-
thing about that war. Nobody knows anything about the Rwanda genocide.
Who really started it? Who did it? Were not going to know for years. The
Pentagon just released that document that was classied about the Three-
Week War. Were starting to learn a lot of things from leaks that Saddams
own generals were shocked when he told them on the eve of the war that
he didnt have WMD weaponry because they thought that was in their own
arsenal.
So how do you in a middle of a war sort out things? Many of you might
think that this controversial issue of WMD is easy. Mubarak in Egypt said
Saddam had it. Bill Clinton said he had it. Our troops had chemical suits
on the expectation that he had it. Saddams own generals thought he had it.
It might have gone to Syria according to a top-ranking Iraqi general who
thought there were seventy-six prewar ights there.
How do you have faith when you dont know the answer, and we
wont know the answer until all the million plus documents are translated,
until we create a stable society in which people that were involved in the
WMD process can come forward without being killed. Thats going to take
years. But in the meantime, you just have to use the power of reason and
ask yourself, Is it reasonable to ght after the Senate voted for twenty-
three writs of war against Saddam Hussein, ranging from the destruction
of the Delta wetlands to the violation of the U.N. accords to violations of
the armistice, U.N. oil for food program, to violations of no-y zones? In
fact, they had twenty-three different reasons to go to war.
You could say Bush was wrong, that the privilege of making that de-
cision shouldnt even be his, but is it really logical to think that Bush did
this alone? Hey, the Senate passed a resolution that gave him the power
to go into Iraq. Is he saying now, They gave me twenty-three different
reasons why I can go in. Im going to make up this one about WMD and
scare everybody, because the other twenty-two wont y, and they might
not scare us enough? And then tell Blair to lie and say theres WMD. Tell
 Victor Davis Hanson 13

the Arab governments to lie. Get the military to go out and buy a million
chemical suits so we can all get in there in the desert heat and wear it be-
cause it looks good, and make sure that you have all of Saddams generals
on board too. It just doesnt make sense.
The more likely scenario is much more convincing; there are a lot of
reasons the president said, Hmm, Ive got to go to Iraq and address this
WMD threat. But you know when I keep listing all other reasons for war,
they will think Im throwing mud on the wall and if some doesnt stick,
Im throwing everything except the kitchen sink. So he focused on one
writ, WMD, and lost focus of the broader picture, and he was relying on
intelligence that even Saddams generals shared.
That makes sense, human nature being what it is, but we wont know
the answer until everything comes out. Thats true over war. Were still
ghting over what caused Pearl HarborWhose fault was it? And we
dont really know yet. What I nd most disturbing as a military historian
is the modern notion of utopian perfectionism, that you as a historian or
you as a citizen of the United States of 2006, either by your birthright or
your education or your wealth are Mr. Know-It-All and youre infallible
and anybody that makes a mistake is culpable and should be punished im-
mediately.
Thats a very dangerous attitude to have. That may have lost us World
War Two. I think the most impressive American in World War Two that re-
ally helped us win that war was probably George Marshall, the Army Chief
of Staff, the Secretary of State, and later the Secretary of War/ Defense.
I could make a propaganda speech right now that would make you think
that he was one of the stupidest people in the world. I can say, You know
what? The Russians had T-34 tanks with a low prole and four inches of
armor. They had an upscale 88 millimeter gun. The Germans had the lat-
est improvements too, four inches of armor. Why did we have Sherman
tanks with high-prole, narrow tracks, an underarmed 75, all in the theory
that were going to build a bunch of them and theyre going to be me-
chanically reliable and swift and our army will have parity? Thats stupid.
I mean, you got all these people killed with these Ronson lighters there-
fore he should be impeached, because he made the decision to go with
the Sherman. We made the decision to go with the Sherman because we
looked at the alternativesthe Grant, the Stewart and other designsand
youve got to get a tank in there, you have a common American familiarity
with engines and reliability and utility of parts. You could make thousands
14 War, Ancient and Modern

of these and they would swarm the European continent, and on any given
day, the Shermans would be meeting soldiers, rather than other tigers or
panthers and they would get to Germany across a thousand miles and be
reliably quick, and he was right.
Go back and read the literature of B-17s. You know, B-17s, four-en-
gine bombers? You wouldnt believe the literature in 1939, before we got
into war. This is what the literature said: The Battle of Britain. Well, the
Germans cant defeat the British, because they dont have a four-engine
bomber, but we have had one since 1936. Its called a ying fortress. Its
what people in the U.S. military and civilians wrote about in 1939. Our
ying fortress was aptly named: it can y 250 miles an hour, its as fast as
the ghters of the age, it could drop almost 8,000 pounds of bombs, it has
11 50-caliber machine guns, its got highly trained crews, it has a range of
2,000 miles, its indestructible, and we can put them in formations, wheth-
er staggered or not so we can get support from their 50-caliber machine
guns because theyre stacked wisely in the air, and we can send them over
Germany during daylight without ghter escort, and we could bring Ger-
many to its knees without ever invading. Thats what we thought.
And the British said, You know, we cant do it. Weve got Sterlings
and Halifaxs and we go at night and we drop Napalm and we cant do
it, and you cant do it. And we said, Oh, but youre not Americans.
So we went ahead and we tried it, and 20,000 Americans got killed. We
had losses of about 20% on some missions, and if we had continued that
for three weeks, we would have lost an entire eet. During this process,
everybody would say, I never said that B-17s could do that. He said it,
not me. Well, B-24s can do it. But then B-24s couldnt do it. And they
said, Well, I wasnt always one of these air supremacy followers. I was
always a ground guy. I was always tactical support. B-17s should y low
and drop bombs like a ghter bomber.
And they tried it, and it got a little better. And then people said, You
know what? We could go from B-17 A, B, C, D, E, F, G and we could up
the horsepower in the engines, and we could get up to 275 miles an hour,
and every once in a while, wed have to put in a 20-millimeter cannon,
and we could teach new tactics and increase ghter power, and better yet,
youve got new planes called the P-38 and P-47 and P-51s soon, and we
can try a new idea called disposable tanks. They could get us all the way
over to France, and somebody said, You know, now, we can get closer.
Well, they invaded Normandy, and once we have France, were not only
 Victor Davis Hanson 15

ying from Britain, weve put bases in France and the turn around time is
not 1,600 miles, its only 900. And then well get something that we dont
really call a ghter bomber. Well call it a ghter escort like the P-51, and
that will not only accompany us all the way to Berlin but it will be, in per-
formance standards, better than the FW-190, and then it will escort us and
it will go off on its own and attack Germany.
And suddenly the loss rate went from 8% to 7 to 6, and suddenly we
destroyed the cities of Germany and everybody said, You know what?
I was for strategic bombing all the time, but 20,000 people had to get
killed to learn all those lessonsintelligence failures, technological laps-
es. When you think about who didnt armor the Humvees or who didnt
armor shoulder pads on everybodys body armor or who disbanded any-
thing, these are minor in comparison to what this countrys gone through,
but the difference is that that generation came out of the Depression, poor
and impoverished. Life wasnt all that good to begin with, and they were
experienced with hardship and deprivation. Our generation grew up not
just with televisionof three channels at nightbut now 500. I thought it
was great when my parents brought a player home, what they called a por-
table record player. This is about 1960, and we had this thing that looked
like a little suitcase and you opened it up and thered be this needle. My
parents would always say that they were going to buy a diamond needle
that cost $62. And with a diamond needle, you could put these new vinyl
LPs, long-playing records that were hard to get. You usually just had the
little, short 45rpms. We opened this box, put on this LP, and turned it on.
My grandparents came down from the farm and said, You know, we had
to crank ours. And they had this ugly big megaphone that comes out and
it was scratchy and the records were about this thick, while we had these
light, thin, vinyl things with this little tiny thing and the diamond thing.
And my dad would tell everybody on all the farms, We have a diamond
needle on our stereo. That was what we called it, stereo, and thats what
we did.
But you know, if my kid has an I-pod, and his sister has 2,000 songs
and he has 500, he thinks hes a failure. Its just the ever-increased expec-
tation that makes it harder to accept human frailty and deprivation.
Thats your biggest challenge in the military: the more afuent you
become, the more afuent the people you protect become, the demands
for perfection are going to increase, and war, unfortunately, can never be
16 War, Ancient and Modern

perfect. Its an art, though a terrible one. Its not a science and its not infal-
lible, so there are going to people who are killed.
When I was in Iraq during the last couple of weeks, I noticed the day
that we took off, a Black Hawk went down in Iraq, and ten marines were
killed in the Gulf because somebody screwed up, and I thought, God,
thats just a waste. But I realized that we were going 150, 200 feet above
Baghdad every day at pitch black night, with no lights on, with night vi-
sion goggles, with 22-year-olds ying us under power lines, all they have
to do is make one mistake.
So war is full of chance that we dont tolerate any longer. Thats
hardto wage war when you cant make any mistakes because life is so
good that you cant lose it. Im not trying to criticize that idea. I think its
wonderful that we have those high expectations, but there are going to
be people who are human, and they are going to make decisions that are
wrong, and people are going to die for that. Thats part of the nature of war.
Thats depressing. Lets get another question.

MIDSHIPMEN 2/C DARREN BEATTY: In Iran, it appears that China

and Russia and Europe are on our side again. What is Russia up to and
whats their stake in this whole thing? What does our future with them and
our relationship with them look like politically and militarily?

HANSON: Lets go through the Iranian situation, and well play a

game.Cui bono? Who benets? Lets start with the Europeans. If youre
a European, what do you want to happen with the Iranian nuclear ques-
tion? Well, you do not want them to get a nuclear device and blackmail
Frankfurt, because here you are, a German, for example, who can build
nuclear weapons like Mercedeses, if you want to, and you have a third-rate
state threatening you. Youve got them pointing a missile at you, and they
say, Hey, we want ten billion in aid this year. So you dont want that,
right? You are the laboratory of the Holocaust. Six million Jews got killed
in your country because of what you did. You dont want to be responsible
for allowing them to wipe out the few Jews left in the world of Israel. So
you dont want them to have it, but youve got some problems.
Im done speaking about Germany, so well call them Europeans.
You have no military power. You couldnt stop the Iranian military if you
wanted. Europe does not have the logistical support, the refueling tanker
capability, the skilled pilots to y from Europe and take that stuff out, and
 Victor Davis Hanson 17

they have no political will to do it militarily. Okay, so what do you do?

You craft a belief system that says, The world doesnt operate according
to military power but multilateral dialogue.
And you court the head of the U.N., the International Atomic Energy
Commission, and you make something called the EU-3. You want to talk
the Iranians out of it, but youre not credible. You know they wont talk
unless they think that theres going to be a stupid American named George
Bush, whos absolutely crazy. So what you do is, you go with the Iranians,
you say, You know what? Weve fought with this crazy Texan Christian;
weve got him ghting in Iraq. We cant control this guy. You know, were
talking to you. We dont believe in weaponry. We like you guys. Were not
pro-American, but if you dont talk to us, that nut is going to blow up the
world. And so then they come and tell usIm not making this upIve
talked to people whove listened in on this. They come to us and say,
Look. Youre isolated. Were trying to help you, so were going to do this
dialogue and we promise not to trash you too much, but youre going to
hear some pretty bad stuff third-hand about what were saying about you,
but what youve got to do is, you cant be like us. Youve got to keep quiet
or act like youre nuts, but otherwise; we dont have any bad comments.
Whats Mr. Bush doing? Notice how hes keeping quiet? Let the Eu-
ropeans do it. Da da da da da. . . . And then he calls up Rumsfeld and the
CIA and he says, What date will they arm those missiles? And you get
some hypothetical, its all hypothetical. Were going to take them out
on that day, but just be quiet and let the Europeans do it. Now, why do
we want to take them out? We want to take them out because, if we dont
take them out, theyre going to immediately point them at the Kuwaitis,
the Abu Dhabis, the Saudis, and theyre going to say, The price of oil is
going to be $80 a barrel this week, and youre going to cut production. We
wont cut though. Were crazy. We want to go to paradise; were going to
take out Riyadh if we have to.
Another nut tells the Israelis, You better withdraw to the 1967 line
because youve only got 12 million Jews. Youve got half of the Jews in
the world, and were going to take you out, and youre going to hit our
cities, and were going to lose half our people. Its worth the destruction
of the Jews. The whole open paradise mind thing. Iran will be there and
Israel will not, and the next fty years they will not praise us, but in 200
years they will praise the Shia for supporting the Muslim nation. So we
18 War, Ancient and Modern

dont want them to have nuclear weapons. We have an interest in stopping

Iran, and the Europeans in their own bizarre way do, too.
Now, Chinas a different story. Chinas thinking: Hmm. All things
considered, it doesnt help anybody to have nuclear weapons because, af-
ter all, look at our stupid foreign policy that got us a border with nuclear
Pakistan, nuclear India, nuclear North Korea, nuclear Russia, and nuclear
United States. So, were not too smart, and weve got to watch this.
On the other hand, the United States is bogged down in Iraq. The
United States is bogged down in Afghanistan. Get it tied up with Iran so
that we start getting close to the Philippines, bump a few American ships
sailing off Taiwan, y over Japan and say, Oh, that was your airspace?
Sorry! and ex our muscles and get some political concessions.
So the Japanese and the Taiwanese and the South Koreans and the
Philippines call us up and say, Hey, you Americans. We like you guys
a lot, but youre not here right now and those Chinese have got all this
American cash, and theyre pushing us around. So it makes sense for the
Chinese to cause us trouble with Iran, and if I were the Chinese and I
thought like a Chinese expansionist, which Im not saying all the Chinese
do, but if I were a Chinese expansionist, I would do this: I would tell the
Iranians, Look, were going to talk about the U.N. until it makes you
sick. Were going to talk about why and how push comes to shove. We
are not going to do anything in the U.N., and we are vetoing anything that
happens. Just make a long-term oil contract. Oil will pay whatever you
need. Well send you weapons, and you can cause all of the trouble with
the United States that you can, but if they take your nukes out, were not
going to do much because we cant. Thats the risk. You wanted to do it so
go ahead and do it.
The Russians? Well, the Russians are thinking, Hmm. You know,
the United States has been pushing us around since the fall of the Soviet
Union, and now, were nally the biggest oil exporter in the world. If Iran
screws up, if theres a strike there and theres some nuclear thing and the
price of oil goes up to $100 a barrel, how can that hurt us? And how can
it hurt us if Iran has Hezbollah or Iran has missiles? Theyre going to be
pointed westward, not toward us, because Iranians think that were crazy.
Remember what Putin said to the French journalist? He said, Are you
mean to the Chechnyans? Remember what he said? Am I allowed to say
this in polite conversation? He said, Do you want to have your balls cut
off? Thats what he said to a reporter who asked him that question. Imag-
 Victor Davis Hanson 19

ine if George Bush had said that. So the Iranians know that the Russians
are crazy and have a lot of nukes. Well, theyll never point those things at
Russia, and the Russians understand that Hezbollah knows that too.
So thats what every side is doing, and hows it going to work out? It
seems to me that its going to work out like this: The negotiations are re-
ally going to embarrass the Europeans because nothings going to happen.
In fact, the U.N.s not going to do anything for reasons outlined because
the Arab world, the Islamic world, Russia, and China will openly stop
anything that happens. The Iranians will see all these negotiations, and its,
one forward, one back, one forward. Heres the Iranians idea of the whole
thing, one day, forward, next day, back. At some point, out of the blue,
were going to wake up in a year or two or three, and theres going to be a
strike against the nukes; the United States will take them out.
Is that going to be good? No, its going to be awful because whats
immediately going to happen is this: Were going to wake up, and the New
York Times is going to say, Indigenous, Idealistic, Iranian Democratic
Movement Was Just About to Topple the Bureaucracy They werent, but
still the media is going to say, They Were Just About to Galvanize Popular
Will. Bush or McCain ostracized them, marginalized them, and empow-
ered the mullahs. Thats the rst thing. Next day, a New York Times award
winner is going to say, Intelligence Faulty. Now We Know Iranians Were
Twelve Years Away From Getting Bomb Not One. Next day were going
to read, Not All Facilities Taken Out. Mix-up With Air Force Bombing,
Hit the Wrong One. It Was Actually A Pharmaceutical Company.
Now, who wants to go through that? I dont. You dont, but thats
whats going to happen. Believe me, and at the end of the day, they will
not be able to make a bomb for about ve more years; thats our breath-
ing space, but to get to that point is going to be terrible. Youll be in the
military when that happens. I just look at that problem and shudder, but
one thing I remember about the military is that just because there is a bad
choice and a worse choice, does not mean that you dont have a choice.
Theres always a choice, and its usually bad, but its not as bad as the
alternative. The alternative, the worst choice, is letting those guys go nu-
clear. That would be a nightmare.
I had a debate, not long ago, and the person, the journalist said, Well,
Pakistans nuclear. Well, that presupposes a couple of thingsthat thats
good or at least not bad. As I said to the person, Do you think theres
a reason why we cant catch Osama Bin Laden when we know hes in
20 War, Ancient and Modern

Pakistan? Do you think theres a reason why we cant protect the Afghan
democratic experiment from attacks from Pakistan and the Taliban? Do
you think it has something to do with Pakistans nuclear deterrent that
could take out and kill thousands of American in the region?
And then, theres something called India, thank God, and India con-
nes Pakistan. Its got more nukes. Its bigger. Its democratic. If anybody
knows of a large, regional, responsible, democratic state thats nuclear,
thats right next to Iran, Id like to know who can exercise deterrence. I
dont see any. Israel? Well, no, its not. It can practice some restraint but
its not large enough or credible enough to really hamstring Iran. If Israel
asked to attack Iran, it would be Armageddon.
That would be the natural understandable mentality of the Jewish state.
We cant have a second Holocaust. Theyre going to kill us anyway so this
time, were going to prove to the world that if you want to have a second
Holocaust, that Israels not going to allow it to happen over again. There
will be some Jews in the world who will survive, but were not going to
establish this principle twice in sixty years. You cant just go and kill mil-
lions of Jews and get away with it. Should Israel take this thing out when
a leader of a big country says, I want to wipe Israel off the map? Yester-
day, Amadinejad said, The United States just wants to stop our peaceful
nuclear program to save Israel. Isnt that a contradiction in logic? How
can a peaceful nuclear program threaten Israel?
If youre an Israeli leader, you just have one rationale. By 1945, they
had gassed six million Jews, and whats left of them are either in the Unit-
ed States basically or Israel, and am I going to be the president that would
let the second Holocaust to take place without any action, any answers?
No. So that means that Israel does not have to be 90%, 80%, 70% sure that
Irans going to attack. Once they believe its a 51% likelihood that Iran
will attack, they will attack. Thats a wild card, thats a real wild card.

MIDSHIPMAN 4/C DOUG WITT: Sir, theres been a lot of comment

about the war in Iraq actually increasing the likelihood of terrorism or caus-
ing the increase in terrorism. What do you think about that statement?

HANSON: Ive used this comparison before so I hope Im not being mo-
notonous; I have a little house in Santa Cruz. Im not there now, and it has
been infested with mice and some rats. So about three weeks ago, I went
out and bought ten trays of Decon. You know Decon? Its a poison. I put it
 Victor Davis Hanson 21

all over the garage oor, and I went back to my farm. Three weeks later I
came back, and you wouldnt believe what I found. There were rats on the
shelves dead. There were rats in the washing machine dead. There were
rats everywhere in this place.
Now, if youre moderately conservative, youd believe that the rats
were in the house and they all ocked to one place and saw the poison
and died, but it seems to me that if you were on the left, youd believe that
when you put out the poison, it had some genetic components that make
rats come out of thin air, and they all came out of nowhere. And thats what
this dispute is about. So do I think that a 16-year-old kid that grows up
in the slums of Damascus named Amman says, I hate the United States
because theyre in Iraq. Or I hate the United States because they support
Israelis. Or, I hate the United States because their women wear mini-
skirts. I hate the United States because English is all over the news. I hate
the United States because my prophets said Christians were bad or Jews
are apes and pigs.
I dont know what the exact ratio that sets that guy off from being an
extremist to an actual suicide bomber terrorist, but you know this:if he
chooses to go to Afghanistan or Iraq and act out on that impulse, it works
both ways. If he goes and blows up Americans, and the Americans say,
He keeps blowing me up! and we say, Cant handle that and withdraw
then that encourages more people. He comes back home. He gets a big
parade on his block. I blew up a Humvee and they ran away. Lets go do
more of this.
On the other hand, if this man goes over to blow up the Humvee, and
he gets blown sky-high, everybody in his neighborhood will get scared
and theyll say, Do not go over to Afghanistan. Do not go over to Iraq, be-
cause if you do, youre going to get killed, and more importantly, the Iraqis
dont want you there because theyre eating hamburgers now or theyre
listening to cable TV or they all have cell phones. So it seems to me that
all we have done in Iraq is escalated the stakes, one way or the other. If we
fail, yes, its creating more terrorists. If we succeed, its creating less of
them, but thats our choice.

MIDSHIPMAN 4/C TAO CHENG: Do you eventually see a crusade

type of war against the West and the Middle Eastern countries, because it
seems like we havent made much progress?
22 War, Ancient and Modern

HANSON: Youre not supposed to say the C wordCrusades. Well, we

have made some progress, because the Syrians are out of Lebanon. And
even crazy Mr. Khaddafy, who said he didnt want to end up like Saddam
Hussein, gave up his nuclear arsenals, and then nutty Dr. Khan gave up his
nuclear laboratory in Pakistan, and I do think that the Gulf states are lib-
eralizing and Turkey is secular of a sort and Afghanistan and Iraq, I think,
are better without the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, but I get your drift.
When people go nuts over Danish cartoons, thats very depressing.
The question is, ultimately, what are we going to have to do? Were in
a war right now. Its a war of Western liberal ideas versus the eighth centu-
ry. We have a paradigm for the world this time that says, If you want to be
a homosexual, thats your business. Now you may have objections when a
gay wants to get married, but we will discuss it. Its your business. They
have a view that says, We want to drop a stone wall on you. We say, If
youre a woman, go do your thing. They say, This is whom you marry.
This is how you look. This is how you dress. We say, If you want to
convert to Islam, go ahead. The Islamicists say, If you become Christian,
were going to shoot you, and were going to get rid of you. If you want to
live here in our country and youre a Christian or a Jew, were going to put
a tax on you. We say, People should be able to insult anybody.
Those are very different belief systems. The problem with it is our be-
lief system creates wealth. Theirs does not. So if youre in those countries
and you say, Oh our system is superior. Then you have an intellectual
problem. First thing youre going to ask is, Who made my cell phone?
Where did my Internet come from? When do I want to get heart surgery?
Do I want to have it in Jordan or do I want to go to New York? If I want to
drink the water, do I want to drink it in, you know, Yemen or do I want to
drink it in Berkeley? I hope its okay in Berkeley.
Those are the questions youre faced with. The Middle East is para-
sitic on Western technology or Westernized technology and engineering,
and thats very hard to take. It creates feelings of anxiety.
I saw that crazy doctor Al- Zawahiri; remember him? He was Osamas
second-in-command, and he was with his AK-47, and his glasses, and he
said, Oh, the decadent West. Were going to defeat you. And I thought,
Who in the blankety-blank made those eyeglasses? I bet you ve bucks
that you went to a second-rate Egyptian optometrist who had a license
from a European company who sold the franchise to a Korean or Chinese
fabricator, and ultimately, I can trace eyeglasses back to Rene Descartes or
 Victor Davis Hanson 23

even Chinas technology that was stolen by the West in the 14th century
A.D. But you didnt do it.
Who made your AK-47? I bet I can show you that a KalashnikovAK
47 was patterned after a design by Russians, who were emulating Eu-
rope technology and got that design, ultimately, from a German machine
gun series and improved on, but its mostly a Western phenomenon. So
here you are and how am I listening to you? Its a video camera. Well,
which great Islamicist scientist invented the video camera? Which great
Islamicist is creating the technology that we need? The answers none so
its parasitic.Where did somebody over there get the ability to broadcast?
Somebody went over to Berkeley, Southern Methodist, for two years as a
student and learned that and went back.
So its ultimately a war they cant win, because their very system can-
not create the things they want. Its only parasitical. What is in the radical-
ist minds about their own bountyIm not talking about the Arab world or
the Muslim world. Im talking about the radicalswhat have they given to
the world in the last ten years? What device? What brilliant victory? I can
only think of two: the suicide belt and the IED, and whats the commonal-
ity of both of those? Theyre stolen from the West, and the suicide belt has
Western type explosives that are usually imported on Czech designs, and
the IED works with garage door openers that are probably made by some
crazy guy in Ohio and fabricated in Taiwan. They cant even create an IED
or a suicide bomb with their own indigenous technology. It doesnt mean
theyre not dangerous. Their only weapon is to attenuate the will and the
resolve of the West. They cant do anything now.

MIDSHIPMAN 3/C TEAL PETERSON: It seems fairly clear that the

media is taking a very negative cue on the war in Iraq, and. . . .

HANSON: Thats charitable, isnt it?

MIDSHIPMAN 3/C TEAL PETERSON: Im wondering what motives

and interests they have in doing a petty stance like that. Ive got friends
over there who say theyre more scared of whats going on, based on what
they see on the media than whats really happening.

HANSON: The second question is very clear. I had a meeting with the
staff of General Casey and Corelli and Ive seen them on different occa-
24 War, Ancient and Modern

sions, and they gave this condent talk to a couple of us. They said, Any
questions? I said, Yeah, do you have any idea how little time you have to
pull all this off? You dont have much time, so you better hurry up because
everybody has bailed. George Will has bailed. Buckleys bailed. Generals
have bailed. So hurry up. So why do they do that? There are two answers
to that. The general answer is; who are the media? If we went over and
went to the Berkeley School of Journalism or the Berkeley English De-
partment, which is a good preparation for journalism by and large, were
talking about mostly afuent people who grew up in the suburbs, who
have a very rened view of the world, who are very European orientated,
utopian, blue-state, and the idea is that the world should work a certain
logical way. And one of the things that they dont like, that puts a monkey
wrench in that world is military ghting, disagreement, pollution, racism,
sexism, all that stuff, and they dont like that. And thats how they see this
war.
But, more particularly, theyve got a really good strategy. I say they
because I know a lot of these guys. Im talking about the use of main-
stream media, national public radio, public broadcasting, CBS news, New
York Times, New Yorker Magazine, Washington Post, they all have a view
thats utopian.
And then youve got a president named George Bush who cant speak
well publicly. Hes inarticulate. Hes not sensitive. He doesnt look like he
knows much, but you know he went to Harvard and Yale? So hes bright.
Hes Christian, which means he believes in some faith thats not logical or
rational. Hes Texan, which means hes part of the old Confederacy. And
he represents a part of the country that you dont like. I mean, most people
in Berkeley or San Francisco do not like Wal-Mart. They might go there
secretly, but they dont like the idea of a bunch of average, poor people
ghting over a Tonka truck or something, you know what I mean? Or they
dont like the idea of some guy pulling into Starbucks in Fresno with a
seven thousand pound SUV and saying, I want a triple latte, when you
can go some nice little coffee house
So they dont like that red-state system. They like hardwood oors.
Tasteful places. They dont like plush carpet in stucco suburban houses.
And theres another thing going on. Their agenda does not appeal to
51% of Americans anymore. Civil rights; yes. In the 60s; minimum wage;
yes. Unemployment insurance; absolutely. Disability insurance; yes. All
those ghts are over. Now, the idea is that the government is going to go to
 Victor Davis Hanson 25

the next step and have equality of result so everybody has the same money
even though they didnt earn the same or they didnt work the same or they
didnt have the same education.
Americans stop at the notion of absolute equality. Everybody says,
You know what? You guys were right about homosexuals. They should
have exactly the same rights as everybody else, but marriage? No. People
say, You know what? Im mixed on abortion. I kind of see it, and I dont
want back-alley abortions. But third trimester in vitro partial birth? No.
So the agenda theyre pushing has hit a brick wall, and its called
red-state America. Go look at the map of 2004, county by county. The
countrys at stake. What does that mean politically? That means that no
matter how you gure, youre never going to get 51%. Whens the last
time a Democrat got elected to president and didnt have a southern ac-
cent? JFK. JFK. That means the only time Democrats can win is if some
guy talks like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson, and they
think that hes a conservative.
House Republican, Senate Republican, Presidency Republican, Su-
preme Court Republican. Now, when have you been able to reverse that
tide? Im speaking as a lifelong Democrat So how do you reverse that?
What do you think? Well, there are three things youve got to do to get us
back in power. One, youve got to have a guy like Al Gore. You want the
popular vote? Well, he has a southern accent, kind of a mainstream guy.
This isnt the crazy Al Gore that freaks out at every little thing now. This
is the old Al Gore.
So you sound like youre a good old boy, Bill Clinton. Thats one
thing you can do. So I dont think theyll run John Kerry again. Theyll
get a guy who kind of sounds like the vice president, kind of southern.
Thats why youve got John Edwards. It was just a bad idea to get a trial
lawyer whos an ambulance chaser. So youve got to get a southern, kind
of conservative-sounding guy, and second, if you get him a third party
candidate, thats great, because remember, Bill Clinton never got 50% of
any vote. 43% and 49%, thanks to Ross Perot twice, who is now out of the
race. Better yet, a scandal. Vietnam ended with Watergate. Vietnam ended
Richard Nixon. So-called stagation ended Jerry Ford. Youve got to have
something thats really bad.
So how does all this compute? They hate George Bush because he is
representing an agenda that they cant quite defeat legislatively or elector-
ally. Not enough people in America want that radical afrmative action,
26 War, Ancient and Modern

radical abortion, radical gay rights, radical taxation, bigger and bigger
government, more and more social spending, less and less military. They
cant quite get those votes.
Then these very brilliant people in the New York Times or the Wash-
ington Post, they can create just enough doubt to maybe push 51% over
and bring back people to power, and thats whats going to happen. Thats
their goal. So if you pick up something in the New York Times and look at
a news story, itll say, Five Americans Killed, Innocent Bystanders Hit
and youll read way down at the bottom where it says, Iraqi sources say
innocent bystanders were hit and 58 insurgents were killed, but that wont
be in the headline. And all the news will be like that because the people
who put the news out are really tired of George Bush and what he rep-
resents, and they can very carefully nuance the interpretation of the news.
And, in all fairness, the conservatives have a different way of doing
that. Its the bloggers, the cable news, the Bill OReilys, the Rush Lim-
baughs, theyre the response. You can always tell the difference. An NPR
guy has a nasal voice. And then Rush Limbaughs Were going to win!
Thats a different approach, but its the same approach. And theres a war
between these groups. The problem with this is that the bloggers and Rush
have an audience. Air America doesnt. The bloggers are more conserva-
tive. Bill OReilys on the way up. Phil Donahue is on the way down, so
the momentum is more toward the right. It has to be arrested, because after
all, the Berkeley graduates, the Harvard graduates, the best educated, the
most sophisticated, the people who can quote Dante and Homer, theyre on
the left, and smart people should not lose to red-state America. So theyre
really angry people
Thats the attitude, that these stupid people are in control of the country
and theyre backward, and theyre not at all like the Europeans. Theyre
giving us a bad name, and every time I y over to Venice or I walk around
Florence, some Italian will come up and they hate Americans so much,
and I feel so bad for a week. And then, Ill wish that if Bush wasnt presi-
dent, this wouldnt happen. Thank you very much.
Lessons from the Peloponnesian War

PROFESSOR PHILLIP SPIETH: Welcome to the second lecture of this

years Nimitz lectureship. My name is Phillip Spieth. I am the new chair
of the Military Ofcers Education Committee and the Nimitz Lectureship
Committee. And as the new chair, I am following in the large shoes of
Professor Thomas Barnes, who for over fteen years, until last fall, steered
this committee and guided the establishment of this lectureship. One of the
last things he did was recruit and bring to Berkeley the man who is our
speaker tonight so I will defer to Professor Barnes the honor of introducing
tonights lecturer.

PROFESSOR THOMAS BARNES: Thank you, Phil. Its an enormous

pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. Hes literally a man
who needs no introduction. I came late to his work. I have that modernist
fear of dipping too far into the classics, and Victor Davis Hanson is above
all else a classicist. But a few years ago, I got out of my normal groove
of European land warfare in mid 19th century North America to the end
of the 20th century in the Middle East. We decided we needed something
in this course were going to teach on the biological origins of human
warfare to counteract what was a heavily Darwinian emphasis. And we
plucked from the ether a book called The Western Way of War by a clas-
sicist called Victor Davis Hanson.
It was in many ways Victors rst book on the aspects of warfare of
which he has now become, of course, a master. And it was really a won-
derful thing to read because it provided us that great continuity from some
centuries B.C. to the present day of the kind of warfare we were trying to
This lecture was given on March 8, 2006.

27
28 War, Ancient and Modern

study. And since then I have certainly read with enormous passion from
every other book that Victor has written. Tonight he goes back to the be-
ginning of his own interests because he will speak on the Peloponnesian
War and its relevance to current concerns.
Now at the very end of The Western Way of War, he wrote a rev-
erieI use reverie in the French sense of the wordnot quite a dream but
a discursive attempt to tease out from hard and structural fact conclusions
based on those facts, some rather broader picture. He looked at our present
state as of 1987 when he nished the book, and he noted that we were at
a threshold of being able to do away with warfare entirely by annihilating
ourselves because of modern nuclear weapons, and he asked the question,
does an exchange of nuclear weapons that will destroy everything have a
relationship to the Western way of war with the hoplites clashing under
limited circumstances in an orchestrated way on the eld of battle with
buckler and sword. Of course, the conclusion will almost inevitably have
to be probably not much relationship. So tonight in the year, 2006, I think
hes going to have to answer that question before we let him out of here.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, welcome.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you for a very nice introduction. Do

I have to answer that question? In some ways, weve answered it because
we are ghting a war where were spending 3.5% of GDP and using a
fraction of our strength. We have a tradition of going up to almost 45%
GDP as we did in World War II, so there must be a reason why the United
States chooses not to draw on the full resources of the Western tradition.
Ill leave that answer to you.
I dont want to press my luck because this is the third or fourth talk
Ive given, and its the most difcult because why would anybody want to
listen to anybody talk about ancient Greece, an area not more than 50,000
square miles and about a million and a half peopleand what they did
2,400 years ago? Why in the world do we even care about this war be-
tween Athens and Sparta that took place in 431-404 B.C.?
I think there are three good reasons. The rst is that we know a lot
about it. We know more about the Peloponnesian War then we do any of
the Crusades. We know more about it than Poitiers. We know more about
it than a lot of European wars in the Dark Ages and even during the Roman
period. And thats largely because this brilliant historian, Thucydides, was
an imbedded reporter of sorts. He was an exile and went to both sides, and
 Victor Davis Hanson 29

he was not just a chronicler of events, he was a philosopher, so he tran-

scends the material of the war.
So the Melian dialogue is not just about the siege of Melos, but about
realpolitik or does might make right? The plague is not just about an out-
break of something like smallpox or typhoid, but what do people do when
stripped of the veneer of civilization, and just how desperate and brutal
and crude will and can they get? So thats a good reason to read his Pelo-
ponnesian War because its a philosophical text not just a history.
The other thing is, of course, Athens lost, and we are a democracy
and we trace our roots back to classical Greece. People in Europe and the
United States, unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, tended to see
themselves as Athenians rather than Spartans, and so this is very trou-
bling that Athens at its greatest stage of power and inuence and cultural
achievement lost. And why did they lose? Thats one of the reasons we
read about the Peloponnesian War.
And third, there are these antitheses that exist beyond Greece, beyond
time and space and their connes. Is the whale stronger than the elephant?
Its Athens the sea power versus the land power of Sparta. Athens is cos-
mopolitan and sophisticated. Sparta is simple and parochial. Which traits
are more enduring to the human character? Athens is democratic; Sparta
is an oligarchy. Do you trust people with birth and training to run your
government, or do you believe in radical egalitarianism? Athens is a soci-
ety of the many and is Ionic. Ionic means its supposedly interested in art,
literature, and culture, and Sparta is Doric and more interested in military
values.
So there were these antitheses, and in the ancient Greek mind the battle
adjudicated the antitheses. Thus, after the Peloponnesian War, people were
very skeptical of democracy. They read Thucydides; they knew Athenians
had executed Socrates; they knew what they had done to the Mytileneans
and the Meliansand they knew they lost.
All these things make it interesting to talk about. Weve got a lot of
books on the Peloponnesian War, but what Id like to talk about for the
next thirty minutes or so is how it was fought from the point of view of
people like you in the military, the experience of battle itself. I think it can
teach us a lot. Theres one theme that I think Id like to reiterate and the ex-
amples I am going to give reect that quite often: up to the Peloponnesian
War, there had been a system of Greek ethical restraint. By that, I mean, of
course, war was not entirely scripted. It never is. It wasnt entirely socially
30 War, Ancient and Modern

constructed, but there were limitations, ethical, social, political on how

war was manifested. Consider class considerations: who got to be on a
horse? Who got to be in a trireme? Consider the use of capital, the sophis-
ticated use of science and the result of that inquiry is a society that could
use sophisticated pulleys to lift something like the Parthenon friezethe
epitome of realistic sculpture of the classical ageup 35 or 40 feet, and
yet couldnt build a catapult.
A scientic tradition that could measure the distance from the earth
to the moon couldnt develop a sophisticated siege weapon because that
had not been an area that was felt right for exploitation and technological
revolutionkind of like the thirties in the United States when we were not
interested in military affairs. Science was progressing but we hadnt ap-
plied that to defense after the Depression and the sad experience of World
War I.
Now, the war is very simple to understand. It was twenty-seven-and-a
half-years long, and it was that long for one reason. Athens had an enor-
mous eet. Sparta had a crack army. Nobody wanted to go head-to-head
with Athens two hundred triremes. Nobody wanted to go head-to-head
with Spartas eight to ten thousand hoplites. So its asymmetrical from the
beginning, and anybody who looks at this war can say that its going to
go on for a long time because both sides are going to be at cross purposes.
And whos going to win the war? Even without picking up Thucydides
right now, you know that it is the side that gures out the others strength:
either Athens creates a crack army to defeat the Spartan army, or Sparta
builds a eet to defeat Athens. Thats the only way the war is going to end
decisively; and the irony is that the crude, unsophisticated, semi-literate
Spartans actually gure that truth out rst and build a eet before Athens
can eld an army.
Why did the war break out? There are all sorts of perceived grievanc-
es. The Athenian navy was conspiring with the Corcyraeans. There was
Epidamnus, a colony of mutual contention. There was Plataea, the border
city. Be that as it may, it was the judgment of Thucydides who fought in
the war and wrote about his experiences, that it was the Spartan fear of the
Athenian system. Theirs was the rst globalization. There was a word in
the Greek language to be an Athenian. There wasnt a word that meant
to be a Spartan. Athens had everything to offer: literature, art, culture,
radical democracy, creative ideas of philosophy, and an improved standard
 Victor Davis Hanson 31

of living. Sparta really had nothing beyond this close cadre of peers, and
they understood that, and so, in envy and fear, they preempted Athens.
Now, the war is very simple to understand in its actual mechanics. It
starts with the most insane idea you can imagine, from the side that appar-
ently went to war but had no idea how to win it. Spartas idea is simply this
were going to march up to Athens as we always have in the past, and
cut down some trees, stomp some vines, and theyre going to get so mad,
theyre going to come out and ght, and then were going to beat them
in the eld. Our armys better. How stupid could the Spartans be ghting
against a maritime, walled port city? That strategy may have worked in the
Peloponnese with other rural agrarian states, but the Athenians only have
about 60% of their population in rural areas. They can import food. They
can receive money through tribute and they have these long walls that pro-
tect the entire city, and theres no Spartan siege craft that is very good.
The Athenians themselves have an equally stupid idea. Their idea is
like the old notion of rope-a-dope: the Athenians reason, All we have to
do is not lose and the future favors us. And if we dont go out and ght,
theyll keep coming and cutting down some trees, and that will only hurt
the farmers not the city itself, because after all, theyre not going to run the
Assembly. The people who dont own land will be more prominent in the
eet. We get our tribute. We get our food. The eets cant be touched and
well wait them out.
Nor was any Athenian thinking that a city designed for 100,000 people
in Attica in late May might not be so hospitable for 300,000 refugees. So
the rst ten years of the war is simply a failed strategy of invasion431,
430, 428, 427, 425as the Spartans try to come and cut down trees and
burnand thats hard to do for a variety of reasons. I lived on a farm when
I rst wrote on this subject. I went out and tried to do it. I was amazed.
Everybody said the Spartans came in and destroyed Attic agriculture for
decades. Has anybody ever tried to take an axe and cut down an olive tree?
Go buy an axe at the hardware store, which is much better than an ancient
axe. I cut away at an orange tree with a two-foot diameternot a ten-foot
diameter old olive treeand I quit after three and a half hours.
So the Spartans didnt do much, and obviously the Athenians didnt
come out to ght. But something happened that nobody anticipated: be-
cause of sanitation, water problems, and the season, Athens had a terrible
plague. And a city-state that once had a population of about 300,000-
350,000 suffered terrible losses in the year 429428 and then once again
32 War, Ancient and Modern

in 426; altogether they lost about 80,000 people. More people were killed
by the great plague inside the walls than were lost probably on either side
in land battle. How ironic that the Spartans had no strategy, and yet their
lack of a successful strategy turned out to be more successful than any-
thing they could have thought of before the war.
The Athenians have a very good strategy in the sense of not losing, but
it boomerangs on them. The idea of withdrawal into the city kills, of all
people, the architect of that strategy, Pericles, who dies in the second year
of the war from the plague. Well, if Athens is suffering from the plague,
and if Sparta is not able to draw up the army, you know what happens in
an asymmetrical war. Youre going to have that decision adjudicated in
another theater and the other theater, we could call it the third world, was
fought through terror.
Maybe the Athenians could scare the Spartans by capturing their few
merchants and cutting off the oarsmens right hands. Maybe the Spartans
could pass an edict that says any time you see an Athenian merchant, you
throw everybody over the side. Maybe the Athenians could go into places
like Aetolia or Akarnania and nd a third-world group of allies to win over
to their side. Maybe you could go to Corcyra and burn people alive, civil-
ians mostly. Maybe you can attack a schoolhouse and kill every child and
terrorize the community. This nightmare went on throughout the war and
was an expression that the solution to the war was not apparent.
Basically, Sparta tried to terrorize people into revoltthis should
sound familiarfrom the Athenian sphere of inuence and Athens tried to
keep them through terror. So theres a revolt in Mytilene: Athens rounds
up over a thousand people and kills the adult males. If theres a revolt at
Melos, Sparta-inspired perhaps, they line up every male over sixteen and
kill them and send a message of barbarity. And we have this cycle going
on constantly: Sparta is trying to destroy the Athenian Empire and seduces
the third-world by breaking off alliances, often itself using terror against
Athens.
But thats not in itself going to solve the war, so in the year 421, theres
a peace, called the Peace of Nicias. But the peace doesnt solve anything
because the issue the two sides went to war overfear of Athenian pow-
eris not resolved. Instead, its a timeout. You know what happens with a
so-called bellum interruptum, each side in the break seeks advantage.
Next Alcibiades in Athens dreams up this idea of going 800 miles to
Sicily and attacking the largest democracy in the ancient world. I once
 Victor Davis Hanson 33

debated Arianna Hufngton and a very snide remark followed, something

like: Well youre a classicist and you dont know Sicily. Its just like Iraq
And I said, Excuse me? What in fact would be like attacking Sicily, would
be if, right in the middle of our war with Iraq, we decided to attack India
which is larger and democraticand thats what the Athenians did.
That blunder cost them 40,000 soldiers and gave Sparta an advantage.
Now, I should say at this point, there was an earlier way to decide Greek
warfare. For a century, city-states that were rural had hoplites, heavy in-
fantrymen with 6070 pounds of equipment, an oak shield and a spear,
line up in phalanxes and crash together. Few people were killed, 10% per-
haps at most of any one side. The object of the dispute, borderlands, was
settled. They even shook hands. Sometimes, they built a trophy, and they
left. Civilians were not involved. The problem with that system is that you
have to agree as agrarians to follow the rules, because if one side loses and
is not annihilated, somebody might say, Wait a minute. Tonight we can
sneak around and poison their water supply.
But then the Persian War comes, and the Persians dont play by those
rules. What stops the Persians? Triremes and some light-armed troops as
well, and so this old hoplite system unravels. Then the Athenians destroy
it by staying in their city and having a eet and using money instead of
infantry for defense.
All that being said, it doesnt mean that hoplites arent valuable. If you
discard the idea that they settle an entire war and redene them as settling
a battle, then they are very useful assets in a larger strategy. So we have
only two hoplite battles in twenty-seven years of this war.
Remember one other thing about the scarcity of hoplite battles in this
war. We dont have more because there is only one other army that can
ght the Spartans in a hoplite battle and, in fact, prove to be far better than
the Spartansthe Boiotians. Remember Athenian tragedy. You read the
Oedipus. Every nut and troublemaker like Antigone is always in Thebes.
Athenians hate them; but they are tough agrarians and have a wonderful
army. During the Peloponnesian War, they are on the same side as the
Spartans; so thats one reason you dont have hoplite battles between al-
lies. Once the war is over and they turn on each other, you have hoplites
battles like you wont believe in the fourth century.

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Can you tell us what a hoplite is?

34 War, Ancient and Modern

HANSON: It comes from the word hopla probably. It means equipment,

and its heavily-armed foot soldiers with breastplate, shield, and spear who
ght in close formation. Now, these two battles of the Peloponnesian War
in 424 and 418 at Delion and Mantineia are important because if you put
20,000 men on a battleeld, theres going to be ramications. The Athe-
nians in 424 decide to go up to Thebes and have a hoplite battle. They go
up there, they lose, and thats the end of that war and their efforts to get rid
of a two-front theater. They will still have enemies at Thebes in the north
and Sparta in the south. And next the Athenians try to get their allies to go
down south and ght the Spartans at Mantinea, and they lose. After that,
theres not going to be any hoplite battles that settle this war.
So, besides the terror, besides the agricultural devastation, besides
the plague, and besides the lack of hoplite battles, this war turns to other
theaters for resolutionits sort of like a ping pong ball: it just bounces
around and tries to nd an avenue or landscape in which it can be decisive,
and then it starts to involve cities.
There are, if you count them, twenty-one sieges in the Peloponnesian
War, and heres a very funny thing: almost all of them are successful and
yet almost none of them are successful by the three ways that you usually
take a city. You either go over the top with siege craft or ladders, or you
take a battering ram and go through the city walls, or you dig under the city
and undermine the walls. The Greeks try all of that and usually meet abject
failures; and yet usually the siege, except for Syracuse, is successful.
How? The attackers surround the city and starve it into submission.
Now that being said, you can see whos ultimately got the advantage: The
people who can best supply the besieging army before it starves outside
the walls. Sparta has only two successful sieges, Plataea and in the north
at Amphipolis. But the Athenians have a eet so they can besiege any ally
that breaks away or any pro Spartan city-state or any neutral like Melos,
precisely because they can supply their eet and they can supply their be-
sieging army and they can starve them out, and they do that wonderfully.
Remember the Athenians have really no reason to go inland because
their allies are all in a maritime empire and the other neutral or hostile city
states are inland; theyre really not concerned with sieges other than those
that can be supplied by water. Thatll be a lesson of the war, this need for
capital to take cities.
So, the Peloponnesian War is really a war of agricultural devastation
in Attica, an inability to get over the plague, terror throughout the Pelo-
 Victor Davis Hanson 35

ponnesian War and third parties, twenty-one siegesand, then, theres a

new element besides these landscapes, and thats horses. I said that Greek
warfare was once in part socially constructed. By that, I meant that certain
ways of ghting, even if they didnt make tactical sense, were favored.
Horses are, of course, always valuable in war. Always were until the inter-
nal combustion engine. Now why didnt the Athenians have many? Why
didnt the Spartans have many?
The answer is found in the landscape of Greece: they are absolute-
ly worthless as a productive animal in early Greece. You cant eat them.
Think of all those wonderful horses in Greek mythology, whether theyre
centaurs or Pegasus, theres this taboo about killing them for food. Only
the French eat horses in the West, and you couldnt eat them in the ancient
world. There were also no harnesses. So the ox with the yoke was the beast
of choice to plow. Plowing with horses really didnt start until the Middle
Ages. And there were not stirrups. That meant if you were going to ride,
you could get knocked off very easily. So there were not heavily armored
shock troops. And mounts in Greece are not really horses; theyre ponies.
More like a Welsh pony. Theyre small. No saddle of any note and no stir-
rups.
So what do horses do? Theyre for reconnaissance. And theres one
other wrinkle: wealthy people own them. If you have ten acres, you can
support a family of ve best with olives, barley, and wheat. But if you
want to have some beef in your diet or goat, maybe you need fteen acres.
Yet if you put a horse on your land, it takes about two to three acres, or
even more, in Greece for the entire yearand what do you get out of it?
Nothing.
So for horses you have to have a hundred acres. You need to be a
wealthy man, and you use the mount to prance around and show off your
long hair and perfume and youre of the cavalry class. And then during
battle, you dont do much. There are areas in Greece where raising horses
is sort of economical. You have large plains in Thessaly with meadows and
you can raise horses; theres also a horse culture in Macedonia and theres
a horse culture in Sicily. But what we see in the Peloponnesian War is that
this prejudice and snobbery or genuine fear of the aristocratic horsemen
starts to erode.
When the Athenians go to Sicily, lo and behold, what do they nd?
Twelve-hundred horsemen, and these are not just prancers. They have cor-
duroy armor in front. They have skilled people who can shoot arrows and
36 War, Ancient and Modern

throw javelins, and they can nd foot soldiers in an open plain and wreak
havoc. You can see where this is going to go after the war, beginning with
Phillip of Macedon. The successors after the Peloponnesian War see that
horses can be a valuable component of Western warfare and theres no
social or economic cultural prejudice to nullify that.
So in some ways, the Peloponnesian War is the discovery not just of
siege craft, but of horsemanship as a real asset in war. If you want to know
why the Athenians could not pull off the invasion of Sicily, it wasnt from
lack of trying. It wasnt, as Thucydides said, because people didnt support
it at home. My god, they sent 40,000 troops to Sicily. The loss was instead
because the Athenians had no idea of the importance of horses once they
got there. Remember what happened to them: 40,000 of them didnt make
it home, 7,000 were put into the quarries. If you go there today, at Syra-
cuse you can see the quarries. And what did the victorious Syracusans do?
They branded every one of the Athenian prisoners with a horse on their
forehead, so ironic and such poetic justice.
Well, as this war continues its search for a theater thats decisive, we
said that devastating Attica didnt work. Even the plague, as valuable as
it was to the Spartans, did not destroy Athens. Terror enhanced the cause
but it would not destroy the Spartan army or the Athenian eet. Cities that
were besieged were never the chief allies of Sparta or of Athens, but third
world cities on the periphery. So the way to win this war is to get to its
heart. And to get to the core, remember, you would either have to destroy
the Spartan army or you must destroy the Athenian eet.
Now the Athenians come up with the idea to deal with their dilemma.
They cant destroy the Spartan army. Maybe, however, they can send hop-
lites down to the Peloponnese, and galvanize the allies, and have a tradi-
tional battleand that simply didnt work at Mantineia in 418.
Then they think, Ah, the Spartans are not really a city-state, as much
as a SWAT team, a professional police force masquerading as a city-state.
Their efcacy in battle is an artifact of their main purpose, which is always
domestic surveillance and policing of the helot serfs. Because Spartans
rest at the tip of the volcano, they depend on the population of a quarter
million helots or serfs to remain dormant. Mostly in Messenia but also in
Laconia helots farmed, and the Spartans bizarre militaristic caste system
grew out of that need to watch these serfs; only that way, did the Spartans
learn that they were also good soldiers overseas or beyond their borders as
well, due to such rigorous patrols at home.
 Victor Davis Hanson 37

So the Athenians are always thinking, free the helots, and they ac-
quire a base at Pylos and Sphacteria on the southwest coast of the Pelopon-
nese to have a sort of helot free-zone. That doesnt work too well, but the
Athenians on the island of Sphacteria do take 120 Spartan hostages and
defeat the garrison there. That was very rare to humiliate the Spartans, and
threaten to kill themand that results in part in the Peace of Nicias of 421.
But the Athenians still have been unable to free the helots en masse and
force the Spartan army to surrender in order to get their hostages back.
So were waiting for some big event that will allow these two bel-
ligerents to collide, and that window opens after the defeat of the Athe-
nians at Sicily. Then, the war gets into high gear at last on the seas. The
Persians, who have been watching this slugfest and were unable to defeat
Greece fty years earlier, sense that after Athens has lost 40,000 of its own
men and its allies in Sicily, and after its been ghting for seventeen years,
maybe its time to pitch some real money in, and hope the Spartans, with
a new expanded eet can ght Athens off.
It is at last a good idea and so Persians start pouring capital into the war
and, especially, they build 300 triremes for the Spartans, and the Spartans
in earnest start to hire rowers. Of course, its pretty absurd to see a Spartan
with a red capeand Spartans of course also have these funny warlike
names like Thorax (Breastplate, as in General Breastplate) or Leon,
(Lion, a General Lion) as well as oily hair, dreadlocks in front of their
ears, a horse-hair black and white crest, sixty pounds of armor on them.
Imagine one of these soldiers on the deck of a trireme. Its ridiculous. But
with money, they can hire skilled oarsmen and build triremes. There are
also a lot of people from the Corinthians to the Eleans that know how to
build ships. The friendly Ionians and Dorians on the coast know how to
build ships and are eager to do so once Athens loses its eet. Remember
that those 200 Athenian ships are not seen again after 413 when they go to
Sicily and do not return.
Now to understand the Peloponnesian War, you have to understand this
brutal nal denouement in the eastern Aegean: the most important, most
lethal, most barbaric segment of the Peloponnesian War is its last phase of
about eight years from 412 to 404 when its a knockdown, drag-out ght
at sea. Yet we know almost nothing about it really, because Thucydides
history ends in 411, abruptly in mid-sentence and the narrative is taken
over by Xenophon; and he is not really a seaman and not as interested in
38 War, Ancient and Modern

the critical maritime aspect so we only have a cursory description of the

most important events of the entire war.
The Spartans built a eet of 300 triremes, and they replaced them al-
most immediately when lost. In some sense, they have a simple strategy
akin to that of U. S. Grant in the Civil War. Wherever the Athenian eet
goes, they go. They may lose three ships, as long as they take out two
of the Athenians. Athens must rebuild ships with timbers not seasoned;
theyve lost their experienced crews; theyve largely enlisted younger in-
experienced rowers. So all the Spartans have to do is sink 100 or 150 more
triremes that appear on the seas to protect Athenian tribute and imports;
and then they can eventually starve out the city of Athens itself. The Athe-
nians cannot bring food into the city, when the Spartans are occupying the
fort outside the walls at Decelea. They cant bring it from Egypt. They
cant bring it from Asia Minor.
What all that means is this war that has been waged all over the Medi-
terranean and the Aegean, is now going to radically narrow its geographi-
cal parameters. Again, if you want to deny tribute, deny imported food,
and destroy the Athenian eet, then youve got to go where the action
isand thats along the coast of modern-day Turkey and the Bosporus,
the entrance to the Black Sea. Thats where the money and food comes
from, and thats where the Athenian eet must patrol to protect merchant
ships. So what we see is absolute devastation in a series of sea battles, Cy-
nossema, Cyzicus, Arginusae, Aegospotami, in the period of 412 to 404.
Some 500 triremes go down and perhaps 100,000 men are lost, missing,
or killed. Some escape.
A word about triremes: theyre as bizarre as the hoplite method of
ghting since the ship is really not much more than a oating spear. Its
about 120 feet long. Its only 2025 feet wide and it can reach for short
burst 810 knots. The name denotes three banks and is informative. The
lowly Thalamites are almost below water level; the Zygites, the middle
bank, sit above them; and then the Thranites row on top180 of these
oarsmen on each ship. Just to t the seamen in takes probably 30, 40 min-
utes, and it takes a lot of skill to row, with oars of the same length from
three different levels on the ship. You cant put up a sail and row at the
same time; the ships are so fragile and prone to list. Ten marines (some-
times twenty) are on the top outrigger decks, but they cant even stand up
(it tilts the boat); so these epibatai have to throw things as theyre sitting
and cant go out in rough weather.
 Victor Davis Hanson 39

So again where do all these climactic battles take place? Wheres Ar-
ginusae? Wheres Aegospotami? Wheres Cyzicus? Wheres Cynossema?
Theyre always within a mile of land; and soldiers are usually arrayed
along the nearby shore. Each side does this: spear the escaping crews as
theyre trying to swim to safetyand most Greeks are not that well known
as swimmers.
Triremes have no ballast; so they dont sink; they bob and only par-
tially submerge. Still, for the bottom row of rowers, its very hard to get
out. The Athenians are past masters of ramming, the key to naval victory;
and in a matched ght of numerical parity, they would win. They won all
the earlier minor battles against the Corinthians, but by 412 those tried
rowers are mostly dead. Remember they lost them to the plague. They
lost them in Sicily, and theyre hiring young Athenian kids and slaves,
while the Spartans are hiring experienced mercenaries. In these battles,
the Spartans typically lose almost every one of thembut they manage to
sink fteen, twenty, forty Athenian triremes nonetheless. By 406 the last
chance for Athens is to wager all at the Battle of Arginusae, and it is so
desperate that they offer freedom to all the slaves in the city to row. They
build green triremes. Yet in the battle, they absolutely destroy the Spartan
eet, sinking somewhere between 160 and 180 triremes
Then follows the paradox of Athenian democracy that is as ckle and
foolhardy in victory as it is sober and responsible in defeat. The cowered
Spartan envoys come and say, Well, this wars been going on for over
twenty years and neither side can win. We didnt think you could pull it
off but you did. So I guess we better go back to the status ante quo. But
the collective madness of Athens is expressed in reply by something like
the following: Ah, the fact that they want peace shows that theyre weak,
and if we just press on, we can destroy them.
So two years later at the Battle of Aegospotamiremember the Spar-
tans have unlimited capital, unlimited mercenariesthe Spartans and their
allies rebuild their eet and destroy the Athenian eet utterly. After the
battle of Aegospotami, a Spartan king at Decelea boldly patrols right out-
side the walls of Athens. Theres no more tribute; some brilliant Spartans
are starting to master seamanship, none more so than Lysander. He sails in.
They start to blockade the city. Theres soon a coup inside as pro-Spartan
oligarchs take over.
All that and more nally spells the end of Athenstwenty-seven-and-
a-half years after the Spartans rst crossed into Attica. The wages of such
40 War, Ancient and Modern

ghting were terrible: there ceased to be an Athenian Empire to excite the

Hellenic world and redene being Greek as being Athenian. You couldve
put on an Athenian tragedy every day for the cost of this war. Athens will
lose its democracy for a while, along with its eet. The purpose of the
warSpartan fear of the Athenian empirehas been resolved.
Now, a couple of nal reections before we go to the questions. Al-
though the war accomplished the aims of the Spartans, Athens soon re-
bounds. It restores its democracy and plays a major role in balancing The-
bes against Sparta, and vice versa. We dont know why Thucydides ceased
his history in 411, but it might have something to do with this unexpected
postwar resurgence of a defeated Athens. As the historian collects his notes
to nish the narrative, the war ends. Now its 403, a year after, then 402,
401. Suddenly the tragedy of Athens is not so tragic as it surges back from
defeat. How are the themes of Thucydides history going to make sense?
Because we know that he probably lived into the 390s: perhaps despera-
tion that his grand theme of decline was not so grand may have stopped
him completing the last books of his narrative.
Also, remember how the Greeks kept track of the calendar. They dated
by the Olympic year, beginning in what we know as 776 B.C. But we
moderns divided the calendar by centuries and so privileged the notion of
a 5th century Athens. All have heard of 5th-century Athens. But rarely of
4th century Athens or 6th century Athens. But the Greeks had no concept
of measuring their periods by a hundred years. That was a new concept of
the 5th and 6th century A.D. when people went back to the Julian calen-
dar, and began to calibrate dates from the birth of Christ in hundred-year
blocks. And when 19th century scholarship converted Greek dates to the
modern calendar, by this reckoning there was a neat bookend at the 5th
century B.C. Athens loses in 404. Socrates is executed in 399. Sophocles
and Euripides die in 406. So theres no Sophocles, Euripides, much less
Aeschylus tragedies at the end of the 5th century. Aristophanes has only
a few comedies to produce in the 4th century. So according to this way of
thinking, the Peloponnesian War coincided with the end of the great cen-
tury, and caused the end of tragedy, the end of philosophy, even the end of
the building program on the Acropolis. So we were taught that there was a
5th century Golden Age and then the next 100-year block, the 4th century,
is one of decline. Keep that modern articial periodization in mind about
the Peloponnesian War.
 Victor Davis Hanson 41

Final observations: What were the military lessons? After this war is
over, siege craft is accepted as a favoredand ethicaltactic, as well as
killing civilians inside the walls by starving them, by rendering them vul-
nerable to disease. And to batter down walls in this new theater, the new
technology of catapults follows, and soon with torsion catapults, spring
loaded with hair or sinews, Alexander and Phillip can knock down a Greek
wall very quickly.
Hoplites will be integrated with cavalry. Cavalry will be heavier and
will be used as a shock force under Phillip and Alexander. Taboos against
the use of slaves will disappear. Warfare, in other words, will be divorced
from ethical restraint. And in the 4th century and 3rd centuries the Greek
genius for art and literature and culture will be applied to warfare, the great
age of military tactics written down, treatises, abstract speculation and
practical advice about sophisticated siege towers, sophisticated artillery
and sophisticated logistics.
The genie was let out of the bottle by the Peloponnesian War. That
alone makes it a watershed. And someone is watching this war and learn-
ing its lessons: Athens took twenty-seven years, and they could not defeat
Sparta. They had the right idea of freeing helots, but not the manpower to
ensure liberation. And they never defeated the Spartan army, do that and
free the helots en masse, and victory is certain. So fty years later in 370,
a brilliant, Theban democratic idealist named Epaminondas arrives with
a brilliant strategy: crush the Spartan army with superior tactics; organize
a grand army of Greeks to march right down to the heart of the Pelopon-
nese; build three gigantic walled cities at Mantinea, at Megalopolis, and
Messen of democratic societies; free all 250,000 helots; the Spartans will
have to grow their own food, and theyll be humiliated. And thats what he
did in 370. And after that, Sparta becomes each year increasingly impotent
and soon thats the end of the Spartans as a major power. So, the people
who really learned the lesson of the Peloponnesian War were neither the
Spartans nor the Athenians, but the Thebans.
Thank you very much and Ill be happy to answer any questions.

QUESTION: You mentioned that Athens did a really, really dumb thing
by invading Sicily and that Syracuse was a democracy with a large popu-
lation. Could you elaborate a little more on how Syracuse being a democ-
racy in particular was relevant to the defeat?
42 War, Ancient and Modern

HANSON: Well, if you read Thucydides account of this war about Me-
los, Mytilene, and Samos, it becomes apparent that one thing in the Athe-
nians favor is the Ochlos, the demos, the revolutionary party that always
supports the poor, the mob, the mass. That was the great life work of GEM
de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, and that gave the
poleis resonance, gave them a cause. So what do they do in 415? They go
over and attack a large democracy and that seems to create cynicism about
Athens among the poleis, and leads to a lot of revolts. Not just because
they lost, but because they lost the moral ground. Now whats hard to
understand about Sicily is the judgment of the historian, Thucydides, who
watched it unfold, because in his telling, its a Greek tragedy. Alcibiades
thinks it up, convinces everybody its going to be a walkover, that they
will have all this silver, theyre going to get rich in Sicily. The Sicilians are
really decient in hoplite soldiers, so its supposedly going to be a cake-
walk. So they get over thereand who cares about hoplites? They prove
unimportant.
Alcibiades gets recalled for a variety of reasons we cant get into and
betrays the entire plan to the Spartans; and then the Athenians send a sec-
ond eet of 20,000 men over. And after they expend all these resources,
and after how poorly executed everything is and all the dissension, Thucy-
dides makes this astounding statement. The whole text is about how bad
Sicily is, how stupid it is. And then the historian essentially says, You
know, this thing was kind of dumb, but had the Athenians not fought at
home and given full support, they couldve pulled it off and he implies
that it wouldve worked and wouldve been good, and they wouldve ob-
tained all the status with the allies, and power and resources. So its very
hard to know what to think.
I think hes talking about Alcibiades and thats one of the things about
military history that is so fascinating. Dumb ideas, stupid plans, silly strat-
egies if carried off can bring benets. You know, one of the stupidest things
Hitler ever did was to invade the Soviet Union and yet, you listen to some
of his generals in November or October 1941, and had they gone straight
to Moscow with good weather, they might have pulled it off or with a little
more careful diplomacy with the Japanese about opening an eastern front,
it might have worked. Bad idea, but not necessarily fatal, thats what hap-
pens in history. Sicily was a stupid idea but it couldve worked. It almost
did work. It came within a week of working.
 Victor Davis Hanson 43

QUESTION: Im curious about who the oarsmen before the Athenians

were. I understand the helots were for the Spartans.

HANSON: Thats very controversial because we are told in 406 that the
Athenians freed the slaves to row, but we also see inscriptions earlier
where the muster lists about the composition of the crewmen imply theyre
slaves. At least some of them were freed usually before great disasters. But
usually the poor rowed; theyre called Thetes, the lower classes who own
no land and are paid pretty well at sea, up to a drachma per day. The price
of a trireme is the same as a house and the cost of another house to operate
it for one month. You launch 300 triremes and Athens will be broke in four
years trying to maintain that level. So the poor are always going to be for
sea-ghting: Lets ght at sea. We get paid. We get imported food. Who
cares about the farmers? Theyre right wing reactionaries anyways. Let
their farms be torched or attacked or occupied.
So originally the rowers were the poor, free citizens, and increasingly
as the manpower reserves are exhausted, the Athenians begin to offer free-
dom to their own slaves, and they begin to hire mercenaries. One of the
themes of this war is its a war that each year gets more desperate and
more barbaric, as each is trying to nd the magic strategy to crush the
other. Thats what war does as it goes on and on. It accelerates mans
desperation. If we are still in a war on terror over a lengthy time, believe
me, we will see things you wont believe in the next four or ve years. I
dont think anybody who went to war in 1939 in Germany or anybody in
Japan who invaded Manchuria in 1935 had any idea of Dresden or what
the March 9, 10, and 11 re raids over Tokyo would bring, but thats where
the logic of the war ended.

QUESTION: Do you see any connection between the breakdown of the

social constructions and social consensus about ways to prosecute a war in
Greece and the later annihilation strategies that Alexander employed?

HANSON: Yes, I do. A good question. Here are the forbearers of Alex-
ander and Phillip, these half-civilized people in Macedon. Very early on,
theyre looking at this sophisticated Hellenic northern culture, and they see
this hoplite phenomenon, and say, Hmm, great idea, great technology but
these dumb Greeks have all these ethical impediments that get in the way.
And after the Peloponnesian War, the Macedonians are thinking, Why in
44 War, Ancient and Modern

the world would a hoplite have this stupid twenty-pound oak shield that he
has to hold, and this silly thirty-pound expensive breastplate and this short
spear, and the result is a phalanx in which only the rst three ranks can hit
the enemyespecially when the lives of men are cheap.
So the Macedonian thought continued, Were not utopians. We dont
believe in citizenship and freedom. Were not going to give a hoplite ten
acres and a vote in the assembly. Were a monarchy so well just hire peas-
ants and jettison that superuous breastplate and make them all quicker.
If our new phalangite gets killed, hire somebody else. And if you jettison
that shield, magical things start to happen. You free your left hand. If you
have your left hand free, you have the use of both hands. If you have both
hands, you can carry a spear that can go from eight to ten to twelve to four-
teen to sixteen to eighteen to twenty feet and their successors tried sarissas
of up to twenty-two feet. They probably had to screw them together and
that spear then becomes a real pike; and the rst ve ranks can kill people.
You obtain another 40% killing potency.
Same thing happened with the horses as social concerns vanished.
Who cares if theyre wealthy people that are distrustful of democracy, and
you dont want to empower them? You dont have a democracy in the rst
place, but a horse-owning aristocracy. You can just hire riders to be heavy
cavalrymen. And who cares whether light armed Thracians or poor people
are not citizens? Slings, arrows, theyre also valuable, not to be seen as the
despised craft of the poor.
So what Philip, Alexander, and the Macedonians do is cherry pick
this hoplite experience and create a symphony of multifaceted forces that
has only one objective and thats military utility. Very sophisticated logis-
tics and very sophisticated siege craft follow. They use the Greek genius
to employ capital, master logistics and employ sophisticated deadly war-
fareand that is really the birth of Western warfare and the legacy of the
Peloponnesian War. That is the army they create, and when they invade
Asia in 334, within eight years theyre on the Indus River. Its simply
unstoppable.

QUESTION: Did the Spartans attack the Athenians because they allowed
women to be homosexual? Is there any truth to that or is that just a rumor
Ive heard?
 Victor Davis Hanson 45

HANSON: Youve been reading too much Aristophanes. The answer is

no, but theres something to what you heardthis idea that among the
Greeks if the Spartan army is constantly on patrol on the other side of
Mount Taygetos putting down helots, then its not home. If its not home
then the women will have to take on a more important role in society, and
if youre a society that values physical prowess, youll start coming up
with crazy ideas about hygiene and physical prowess. Women who ex-
ercise will have better births, less infant defects, better Spartan warriors.
Women are empowered when home alone. Theyre going to own the prop-
erty. Theyre even going to wrestle naked as men do. So the irony is the
most repressive society is also the most, in some ways, egalitarian as far
as women go. But as far as female homosexuality, that was a joke in some
of the ancient comedies. Its a stereotype, yet Aristotle deplores the role of
women in Sparta in that they own all the property.
So the joke is that theyre lesbian, but theres no evidence that theres
any more lesbians in Sparta than elsewhere. Remember what the word les-
bian means. Its the island of Lesbos where the poet, Sappho, comes from,
the supposed female homosexual par excellence in Greece. If you wish to
talk about the real special case of homoeroticism, its probably the The-
bans Sacred Band of 150 paired something or others. Theyre lovers,
were told. I dont know whether they actually commit intercourse in the
sense of sodomy. Theyre in some physical relationship with each other.
The details remain under contention; very controversial.

QUESTION: You talk about the Peloponnesian War being a redenition

of Greek identity and it being fought on a number of different fronts. I
dont know much about the next two thousand years because I fell asleep
in history class but fast forward to World War I, World War II, and the
Cold War. These were wars that, it would seem to me, were fought on a
number of different fronts for redenition. How do we stack up on the war
on terrorism? You said that we were going to see some things in the next
years so I was wondering, where are we going to see them? What would
they be?

HANSON: You must remember one thing about this war: its mostly a po-
litical and ideological war. Whether you agree with the present strategy or
not, it is that a small group of Islam, maybe 2 or 3 or 4% of a half a billion
Muslim people and that could still be about ve or ten or twenty million
46 War, Ancient and Modern

people who wish us harm. Radical Islamists, because of the conditions of

autocracy and failed economical, social political systems, have been able
to champion their perceived grievances, as if the sewers are backed up in
Cairo because of the Zionist entity in the West, or the crass sexy American
Britney Spears is somehow responsible for water not running in Yemen or
something along those lines.
So they have this puerile ideology. Yet, we have decided these au-
tocracies are more like Italy than Japan or Germanypeople to be freed
rather than conquered en masse. We thought we were at war with Mus-
solini mostly and his fascists, not Italians per se, unlike total war. So we
were always trying to liberate the Italians. We feel that the people in the
Middle East are not our enemies, that their religion has been hijacked,
and therefore that a very small component of American military prowess
is going to be dedicated to the struggle. Were a nation of 300 million and
were only going to keep 130,000 troops over there in Iraq. We have 3,000
tanks. We only have about 500 over there. We have this trillion-dollar plus
economy.
Now, that strategy is ne, but every once in a while Middle Easterners
make us think there are some ssures in this idealism, and in fact the peo-
ple of the Middle East are not so innocent, such as the hysteria with those
Danish cartoonswhen we saw this outrage of primordial threats against
Denmarkthat apparently has mass appeal to people in the Middle East.
Even though they dont like Bin Laden, they seem to like the idea of see-
ing the West take a hit. Just like the people in Germany and Japan did, at
least in the beginning of the war. And my only point is also that a society
as sophisticated as ours can take a 9/11 hit about only once every ve years
because that alone has caused a trillion dollars of economic damage, mate-
rial and spiritual as well. That one event changed the way every one of you
now goes to the airport. That changed everybodys ways of doing business
in the most minute ways.
If tonight, somebody straps himself with medical uranium waste or
cobalt in a suicide vest and walks into the New York Stock Exchange and
blows himself up, and you cant go into the Wall Street for three years
because its radioactive, that will be a big hit that will ripple out for years.
And if three weeks later, somebody goes into the Mall of America with a
suicide bombthat will be another hit. Or if during the Final Four, some-
body takes an M-16 and sprays the audience, the same effect will ripple
out for years and insidiously harm this country. So this society, because it
 Victor Davis Hanson 47

is so interconnected and sophisticated, cant tolerate that type of repeated

attack which is well within the capability of the enemy.
So if that sort of warremember the Maryland sniperstarts to hap-
pen, given what we know about past wars, I think that these ssures among
ourselves will start to disappear and people on the Left, as I said before,
and the people on the far Right will join. The American people will say,
Whatever you think about this war, we cant continue as a society and
take this type of assault.
So were going to have to have a new doctrine, and the new doctrine
is simply that if we nd out anybody gave these people moneyand we
know they do it every day in Saudi Arabiaor if we know theyre hiding
in Pakistan. Or if we know theyre in Iran, then thats it. Youre all just as
guilty as the terrorists. And then youll see things that will scare you, and
I hope that doesnt come to pass. But given what we did in World War II,
this is a country that sent the 29th Marines of 6th Marine Division right up
into Sugar Loaf Hill and found out when they came down Sugar Loaf Hill,
they had 93% casualties. And no one in America was paralyzed by those
frightful lossesgiven it was a war for survival. Instead they trumped that
in Tokyo in the re raids, The B-17s over Schweinfurt were a disaster, and
yet, the U.S. in essence shrugged, Too bad, theyre gone. Lets go back on
the offensive. So this country is capable of things you wont believe.
I grew up in a family of people who fought in World War II, and they
were very upset about the atomic bomb, but not the way that were upset
in the leisure of peace. They were upset, like so many of their generation,
because my namesake had been killed in Okinawa in the Marines and my
father had own thirty-nine missions in a B-29 and the latters point was,
Well, it was no worse than the rebombing, and if we knew it would work
in August, then we probably knew it would work in April. We tested it in
July so why in the hell did we not drop it in April? We wouldnt have had
to invade Okinawa.
Think of that. I remember being in high school and having my father,
as a veteran B-29er, speak to our very young, wannabe left wing class
about the horrors of Hiroshima. I didnt know what he was going to say,
and suddenly he gets up and says it was a terrible mistake: we shouldve
dropped it in April! And I just about hid under my desk. But thats the
truth about the nature of wars escalation, and the brutality that becomes
accepted in time. Just because were sophisticated and were in Berkeley
and we all abhor war and we all listen to Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink,
48 War, Ancient and Modern

all that does not give us a pass, and does not mean that if were forced
against a wall that you wont see a level of escalation that is frightening.
Every society will deal with that.
This country, if it has to, can spend 50% GDP on military spending;
and in one year, can have an army of 10-million people and create weap-
ons that you wouldnt believe. Its just simply that we dont need to do that
yet to win this type of present war. We dont think its moral either to fully
mobilize. We dont think thats right to use disproportionate force. We
dont think that were at war with Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. We dont want
to disrupt the good life of the globe. We dont, we dont, we dontbut
those are all choices we make in peace, because we have a sophisticated
leisure society.
But if the time comes that we think were going to lose all that and
that we have nothing to lose, then I think youll always see that Western
society creates maniacs that make these suicide bombers look like pikers.
Think of Hernando Cortez in Tenochtitlan after the Noche Triste. I mean,
he came back and destroyed the city in week. This idea of a decadent,
weak West, its only now popular, because of our own self-restraint and
thats predicated on the fact that were winning with hardly any invest-
ment of manpower or material. Were dismantling Al Qaeda. We dont
need to do it as part of a total war. But believe me, if these people in Paki-
stan, the borderlands, are planning to blow up things in the United States,
and they get away with it, then you wont see a lot of criticism in what we
do. Im not an advocate of that response. Im just trying to be descriptive
of a bleak future should thing deteriorate.

QUESTION: The Western way of war is not over?

HANSON: I dont know if its over or not, but what I meant in that book,
The Western Way of War, and later in Carnage and Culture, is that the
idea of a Western power turning on a Western power is always scary, and
especially so now because it can accelerate to the nuclear, since we have
Westernized nations who are parasitical on Western technology. But af-
ter I wrote that book, I had a lot of nuts come out of the closet and inform
me I was wrong, that nuclear war was actually practicable. There was no
email in those days of the Western Way of War, but all these fringe readers
sent me papers about kilo tonnage and mega tonnage and that you could
have a nuclear war and it wouldnt destroy civilization.
 Victor Davis Hanson 49

Im skeptical, but the point is that we havent seen the United States
use its full resources in a war since World War II because of various po-
litical restraints. In the case of Vietnam, it was the Cold War. Remember
one other thing: Korea and Vietnam raised the specter of a nuclear-armed
Russia and a nuclear-armed China. Right now, thats not a comparable
constraint in the Middle East. I dont think China and Russia are to going
to threaten to lose Moscow and Peking over Iran. I really dont.

QUESTION: Earlier you said that one of the underlying causes of the
failure of the Sicilian expedition was the technological use of horses and
not what Thucydides has said; which was a lack of unication from Ath-
ens. But isnt it true before Pericles died in his funeral oration, he said one
of the most important things that the Athenians had to do was not to over-
extend themselves as in not going to Sicily and after he died, there was a
complete lack of unication within Athens so wouldnt that be the cause
of going to Sicily in the rst place?

HANSON: Yes, I think what were confusing is the original strategic blun-
der of going to Sicily and questions of tactical stupidity that undermined
the operation, by ghting without sufcient horses, or terrible decisions
that are best characterized by withdrawing Alcibiades right in the middle
of the operation or the lunacy of having a tripartite command. All you
military ofcers understand that the one fundamental is unity of command
going back to Clausewitznot of having a tripartite command. So, tacti-
cally, the operation could be conducted stupidly.
Maybe the way to look at Sicily is as a risk/benet analysis. The risk
outweighed the benets from the outset. That being said, had they known
of the prominent role that horses were to play in Sicily and had they
planned accordingly and elded 15,00016,000 horsemen, and had they
protected their lines of communications, rened their logistics, thought
out their sieges, and had they galvanized to stop the Spartans, especially
Gylippos, from reaching Syracuse through mounted patrols, I think they
wouldve won.
I gave the example of the Nazi invasion of June 1941, something that
makes no sense in as much as the Soviet Union was supplying raw materi-
als to Hitler. I dont know why he gambled, but had he left more of the tac-
tical operations of that stupid idea just to his generals, I think he couldve
at least have had a good chance at victory, a scary thought. Thats one of
the ironies that very bad ideas can work if they work out in a tactically
sound fashion; and if the people involved believe it will workand that
irony has relevance in the modern world as well.
Thank you very much.
The Timeless Laws of War

CAPTAIN DAVID L. BUCKEY: Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening,

my name is Captain Dave Buckey, and I am the chairman of the military
science department. Im here to welcome you tonight to the 22nd annual
Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz lectureship series. The series was started
in 1983 with an endowment, with the rst lecture in 1985. Since then
we have invited speakers, military, civilian, academics, and others to talk
about historical, political, and socio-economic issues. Tonight we have a
very distinguished guest, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. He is here today to dis-
cuss history in war and the issues that are both old and new in response to
that. So rather than have me stand up here and talk, I will let the professor
come up; please give him a warm welcome.

VICTOR DAVID HANSON: Thank you very much for having me and let
me say that Ive had a very enjoyable week here at the Nimitz lectureship.
You people have been very hospitable, and I will remember that a long
time. I dont think Ive ever seen so many military people at Berkeley. Its
funny about this lectureship; people have asked, what are you doing this
week? And I said Im going to Berkeley to speak to the military people.
They thought that was a joke. And I did too but its actually true, and its
amazing. I thought Id speak for about forty minutes and then youre all
welcome to pose questions.
You know were all captives of this twenty-four hour news cycle now
with the advent of the internet and cable news, whereas before the head-
lines were conned to the afternoon paper. I thought in the case of war it

This lecture was given March 9, 2006.

51
52 War, Ancient and Modern

might be valuable to take a deep breath and stop and try to make sense
of what weve seen since 9/11 in a longer view, in this case a classical
context. How would people through most of civilization look at the phe-
nomenon of war until the late twentieth century, and I think that we could
characterize this view more as the tragic rather than the therapeutic.
The rst thing that I was struck by is the ubiquity of war. After 9/11,
I had people tell me Can you believe they attacked us? as if this were
unusual. The rst thing I thought is, well weve been at war quite fre-
quently since Vietnam. We fought the Panamanians, we fought the people
in Grenada, we fought the people in Somalia, we fought the people in the
Balkans, we fought the First Gulf War, were in Afghanistan now.
War doesnt seem too rare to me, and I think scholars will agree. I
keep seeing this statistic, and I dont know how you count the casualties
precisely, but more people have been killed tragically since the end of
World War II than the fty million during World War II. I also read this
commonly cited statistic that more people were killed in the 20th century
in warfare than in all the prior centuries put together.
The tragic truth is something we should accept, and so ponder an en-
lightened but warlike 16th century Venice, or better yet 5th century Athens
at the height of its greatest cultural achievement when it made war three
out of every four years. You can see this strange frequency by the nomen-
clature. You know, as a philologist, language always has to reect reality.
Names can tell us something. If you think about it for a minute there was a
rst Peloponnesian War and there was a second Peloponnesian War. There
was a Punic War and then suddenly they called it the rst Punic War be-
cause there was a second one. And suddenly they called the second one
the second one because there was a third one. We had something called
the Gulf War and now I see this Roman numeral Gulf War I. We think
were at the end of history and here this was the second war in the gulf,
and who knows, there may be a third one and this one were in now will
be called Gulf War II, and there will be a Gulf War III. We have a Battle of
Bull Run and then second Bull Run. Theres an ancient battle called rst
battle of Koroneia, second battle of Koroneia. If you go to ancient Thebes
in the heartland of Greece you can within forty minutes go to battleelds
at Oinophyta, Leuktra, Koroneia, Chaironeia, Haliartos, Plataea all within
a thirty to ve forty minute drive. Theres a reason why Agincourt is near
Waterloo and the Somme.
 Victor Davis Hanson 53

Whether we like it or not, history suggests that war is ubiquitous, and

its reected in philosophical speculation. I can recall Platos comment of
the Athenian stranger, Peace is but a parenthesis, war is the natural state
of man, or that Heracleitus the philosopher said war is the father of us
all, or the character in Xenophons Hellenica, an ancient historian of the
4th century, who said somebody is having a war somewhere sometime
always. I think thats something thats hard for us in the 21st century to
acceptthat whether we like it or not war seems to be ubiquitous.
In 1986, the United Nations commission on violence said that war
is not innate to the human species and could be outlawed or legislated or
adjudicated, but so far since 1986 literally millions of people have been
killed in Rwanda, Darfur, the Balkans, and the Middle East. So whether
we like it or not I think war is with us at least until the nature of man
changes.
In the ancient world when people disputed borderlands, usually one
side won and one side lost and they settled the dispute. Again this is not a
moral question, its just a question that war had some utility when it was
fought. Not all wars, but Im reminded again that most of the -isms and
ideologies that we nd abhorrent in our own recent memory, think of them,
chattel slavery in our own country, Italian fascism, German Nazism, Japa-
nese militarism, Soviet communism, were eliminated by war or the threat
of war in the case of the Cold War. It is ironic that the worst century in the
history of civilization in terms of the number of battleeld dead is the 20th
century, and yet in this worst century more people were killed violently off
the battleeld than on the battleeld. In other words Hitlers eight million
and Stalins thirty million, and now we think in a recent biography of Mao,
seventy million killed by Mao, they outrank the number killed in World
War I, World War II, and the wars since. So in the tragic view, war is as
terrible as the Greek poet Pindar said: War is sweet for him that knows it
not but for those who know it is a thing of fear. But there are sometimes
worse things than war, and war remains useful in some ways to adjudicate
problems, as bad as that sounds.
What causes war? Well we cant just say I know what causes war or
you know what causes war, but I think I know what doesnt cause wars.
Were told that war is caused by misunderstanding, lack of communica-
tion, but I cant think of a war that was ever started because somebody
didnt know what they were doing. I think that when the Argentines in-
vaded the Falklands they knew exactly what they were doing. Now you
54 War, Ancient and Modern

can say it is stupid to ght over a useless piece of ground, but they knew
what they were doing; they had reasons for doing it and thought they could
get away with it.
So what causes war? The historian Thucydides says the Athenians
kept an empire and were willing to ght for it out of fear, honor, and self
interest, these primordial emotions. This is very different from Marxist-
determinism that sides go to war for economic benet. There were Greek
thinkers like Aristotle that said war is a method of acquisition but Im
struck by how rare the actual real need is. So it seems to me that when you
look at a war you have to distinguish grievance from perceived grievance.
And once again as a philologist we can go back to the Greeks and look at
the historian Thucydides who had a word for it, a prophasis, a pretext. So
the pretext is the Peloponnesian war: Sparta says theres an embargo in
Megara, Sparta says the Athenians are besieging a big city up in the north
called Potideia, Sparta says there is a rivalry over the Corcyraean navy.
And then the historian says these are prophaseis. The real reason was that
Sparta was fearful, they were afraid the world was becoming Athenian and
passing them by so they preempted before it was too late.
Do you remember what Osama Bin Ladens fatwa said in 1998? Why
he went to war? He declared war because he said it was the religious duty
of Muslims to kill every American. He had two primary reasons. One, we
were in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy shrines, and it didnt make any
difference that we were out in the middle of the desert, and no American
soldier ever went to Mecca or Medina but that was one of his reasons.
And two, we were behind the U.N. embargo. Well there arent any troops
in Saudi Arabia, and weve stopped the U.N. embargo and given Iraq
the largest foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan, having pledged
eighty-seven billion dollars.
Did he call off the fatwa? No, because that was a perceived griev-
ance. What was the real grievance? Well again, I think it might be these
primordial emotions of fear and honor and self interest. I think that he un-
derstood that globalization had caught up with the Middle East and for the
rst time in its history a person could turn on the internet, ip in a cd, call
somebody on a cell phone, get an antenna dish on his house, and get global
news and see that the world in China or Japan or Europe or the United
States was far better than in the twenty-two autocratic governments in the
Middle East, economically, socially, politically, and culturally. And out
of that frustration there was a devils bargain made with these autocratic
 Victor Davis Hanson 55

governments, many of whom we supported in the real politik of the past,

that said pump oil and keep communists out and pretty much do what you
want, and there was a frustration that the Arab world and the Middle East,
the Islamic world, was falling behind and so dictators said go ahead and
do whatever you want to the United States as long as you dont criticize us
and we have perceived grievances.
And the answer of course, as all reactionaries advance it, is a pure time
and a mythical past where the devout and the pure of mind and heart were
not corrupt and could defeat the indel. Thats probably the real idea. And
if you think thats far fetched, why is it today, Im asking myself, that I saw
the population of Germany was eighty-one million people and yet Ger-
many today is 10% smaller than in 1939 when it had seventy-nine million
people. Why arent German politicians calling for Lebensraum? Theyre
more crowded today than they ever were. Why are not Germans blowing
themselves up to get 10% of Germany back from the Poles? Or better
yet, Japan has roughly the same population, yet its got no co-prosperity
sphere, but nobody is talking about the strangulation of Japanese resources
the way they were in the 30s because those were perceived grievances.
Just like the Falklands were a perceived grievance. I think you can see
from the Argentine economy that the political structure is unaffected by
whether or not they possess that rock.
Theres something going on other than that rock in the Falklands.
Theres something going on in the Middle East other than the dispute that
could be crystallized by disputes over 4 or 5% of the West Bank. Ive been
to the West Bank, believe me that 4 or 5% in dispute doesnt look inviting
enough to have a war over for sixty years. But theres something called
honor and pride and perceived grievance that are involved there. This is a
very different concept than what we think about oil causing wars or natural
resources. They can be catalysts for war but usually they are a perception
of grievance usually among an autocratic country. I say that because we
know that democracies, while they ght everybody more frequently that
any other government, they do not frequently ght among themselves.
There are more democracies now in the history of civilization than any
other time so thats one optimistic note that I think we should keep in
mind.
But just because a state has a perceived grievance does that mean it has
to act on it? We have all sorts of perceived grievances with China, were
not going to act on those. We have perceived grievances with Pakistan,
56 War, Ancient and Modern

were not going to act on those. This is a country after all that seems to be
harboring Osama Bin Laden. We talk about acting on Iran, but we dont
talk about acting on Pakistan. The answer of course is deterrence. Usually
perceived grievances or real grievances dont proceed too far when one
side thinks it will be more painful to act on that grievance or start a war
than it would be not to.
And so I think if we go back to Philip II and read the classical corpus
of oratory against him, he thought that it was in his interest to go south-
ward and that people of Athens and Thebes probably wouldnt ght him
to the degree he thought would be necessary to stop him. We think of
appeasement as a dirty word. Remember, that it was not; it was a neutral
word in the 1930s because people really thought there was a way of talk-
ing to Hitler. Hitler in turn thought that there was less to lose by going to
war than not; it was worth the gamble.
I keep getting back to this crazy Falklands example. Why did they in-
vade the Falklands? You go back and read what General Galtieri said. One
thing was a small English minesweeper pulled out, the other was that a
woman, in a machismo Argentine generals mind, had just come to power
in Britain, and Margaret Thatcher didnt have the grit to stop him. So in
his thinking it was a cheap easy victory and he had no idea that the honor
of the British navy would never allow that to happen.
If you read these leaked reports about Saddam Hussein you get the
impression he never thought the United States was ever going to invade
because it was deterred. Deterrence can be real or imagined: the United
States was deterred by Russia and France and the E.U. in general. If you
look at this tragedy on 9/11 we ask ourselves why it happened. I think
a classical Greek or Roman would say it should have happened earlier,
because if you look back and you look at that long war with Islamic radi-
calism, fundamentalism, terrorism, whatever term you choose to employ,
theyre all loose and inexact terms in some ways, the Iranian hostage tak-
ing, the murder of the marines, 241 in a single day, the destruction of the
American embassy, the destruction of the American annex, the destruction
of the American embassies in East Africa, the near toppling of the rst
world trade center in 1993, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the murder of
the Americans in Saudi Arabia and Khobar Towers, there was this percep-
tion, we were more like a sleeping dog that was being attacked by a ea.
But there was this perception that the United States either could not or
would not do anything about these continued assaults to its sovereignty or
 Victor Davis Hanson 57

its reputation or its honor, and so we lost a sense of deterrence in a way

we had not in the Cold War. And once you loose a sense of deterrence the
world can be very dangerous because autocratic minds think they have
more to win than lose if they can get away with it.
Once war breaks out, who wins and who loses? If we talk about war
as ubiquitous, and war having a tragic utility in some cases, and it usually
involves perceptions, primordial fears more than real legitimate concerns,
and bullets start ring once deterrence is lost, who wins and who loses?
You cant go easily through the history of war and make some blanket
rules, but it seems to me in the West, and the West is that loose, amorphous
term that lumps together Europe, the United States, the inheritors of clas-
sical society mixed with Christianity, and now we see it in Westernized
countries like Japan. But, that system whatever you think about itits
usually under assault as racist, exploitive, homophobic, phallocentric, etc.,
but whatever you think about it, it has this uncanny propensity to marshal
capital for superior logistics, to create technology divorced from religious
or political control, its a market place of ideas, it champions a differ-
ent type of group discipline rather than a cult of the individual warrior, it
seems to have a greater degree of civilians involved in decision making.
I cant think of one Greek general that wasnt exiled or killed or had
his property taken away from him, whether he was in Sparta, Thebes, or
Athens, unlike the people they fought in Persia or the tribal leaders to
the North. If you look at that menu of Western civilization that explains,
I think, to some degree why Europe was more or less pristine for 2,500
years. They were attacked, yes at Portiers in the 8th century; yes, they have
problems with the moguls, the Carthaginians invaded them, Hannibal with
the elephants came, but more or less those are the exceptions rather than
the rule when you compare the extension of European western power out-
side its boarders.
Its inexplicable that a continent with very few people globally, could
nd itself all over the globe. Its not a moral issue; its more a question of
dynamism. Ask yourself why is not Montezuma in Barcelona? Well you
can say he wasnt warlike or aggressive, but he was. Eighty-seven thou-
sand people were sacriced in four days on the Great Pyramid in Mexico
City. But it wasnt versed in the same tradition of navigation, ship build-
ing, the application of capital, gun powder that Cortez brought from a long
line dating back to classical antiquity. That argument could be repeated to
explain why the British were in the land of the Zulus, who were the most
58 War, Ancient and Modern

disciplined and warlike and impressive military in Africa. But that doesnt
necessarily mean that in every case Westernized armies are successful be-
cause there are ways to check their conventional power.
When you see a conventional war with a Westernized army you can
assume it will have superior repower, discipline, technology, command
and control, and somebody will have to nd a way to call that off. Were
seeing that in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and with the British experience
and also the Spanish in colonial times. One of the ways of course is you
create a moral argument in a consensual society that it is wrong to use
such overwhelming force. And believe me something as autocratic as 16th
century Spain had Bishop Sahaugun writing the crown saying Cortez was
immoral and shouldnt have been allowed to do that. Or you can have
the Colensos in Zululand appealing to Queen Victoria to stop the British
army. Or you can have an antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. In
other words you can appeal to Western liberality that in this particular case
Western arms are not used either for a practical or moral reason. Another
good way is to create factionalism amongst the West. Years before the
battle of Lepanto, remember the Ottoman eet was wintering in Toulon in
France and when the Westerners went out to ght the unied powers of the
Sultan they only had the Papal States and Venice and Spain. Most of the
other Europeans were neutral or by the back door helping the Ottomans.
One of the strangest things to do when you go to Iraq is to see that
the most impressive bunker youve ever seen in your life near one of Sad-
dams palaces that is absolutely impenetrable to anything that the United
States could create, but was built and engineered by the Germans. And I
think you can see that the French had oil that may have been brokered at
sevety-ve cents per dollar, its the best deal weve seen in the recent his-
tory of the petroleum industry. So thats another way to call off Western
arms, to create factionalism among the West.
And then theres what we know as asymmetrical warfare. That means
that the west tends to create afuence and leisure at such an accelerating
and dizzying pace that the perception of the good life is one that is quite
different. So if youre in Iraq and youre a graduate of the U.S. military
academy and you have a diploma worth 250,000 dollars and two chil-
dren in an afuent suburb in Burlingame and you get killed in a Black-
hawk over Iraq that will be interpreted differently than the person that
might be killed in the process of shooting you down who is one of twelve
children when the infant mortality rate is high and theres endemic pov-
 Victor Davis Hanson 59

erty and ve or six children out of twelve children die. That perception is
asymmetrical.
When talking about Vietnam we can remember Alexanders invasion
of Persia with just 50,000 phalangites, but he understood he had to kill
many more Persians than he could lose, that each loss was considered in
some ways more catastrophic than the enemys, just because of the level
of afuence or the perception of a Western individualist was quite differ-
ent. And that difference in perception is another way of calling off Western
conventional superiority. For these various reasons mentioned, Western-
ized armies do not always win battles, and history is replete with disasters
from the Little Big Horn to Pearl Harbor.
We know what might be the cause of wars, how they might break out
and who might have advantages, but how do they end? I gave a lecture on
this topic once and somebody said the United Nations ends them. And I
can think of only two wars the United Nations participated in, Korea and
East Timor; maybe somebody else can think of another one. I think the
U.N. troops were valuable as peace keepers. And somebody else said they
ended the Falklands War. I think the British army ended the Falklands War,
and they had it done in a few weeks.
I dont think that as noble as is the Kantian idea of collective global
peace keeping, the U.N. is going to end a war. Usually wars end unfortu-
nately when one side wins and one side looses. Can you imagine the U.N.
proposal for the Falklandsthink of it, right in the middle of the ghting
we could say there is the East Falklands and a West Falklands and partition
the two, the British get one and the Argentines get one, and then we could
have a oating green line in the middle with U.N. peace keepers. And then
the Argentine dictatorship apparently would still be there and say it won a
great victory over her majestys navy and everyone would still have that
problem of a disputed island. But instead, the British navy took care of it,
and today nobodys worrying about the Falklands.
There was a rst and a second Punic War; there was a third one; but
there was not a fourth one. As bitter and crazy as that is to say there was
no more Carthage to pose a threat. There was a rst and second Pelopon-
nesian War, but not a third. The Peloponnesian War broke out because of
a perceived grievance over the growth the of the Athenian empire, but that
was solved in 404 when the Athenian empire imploded and was defeated
by the Spartan empire, and what followed at Athens was quite different
and did not pose the same level of threat to the Spartans.
60 War, Ancient and Modern

We dont have a Nazi Germany today. In fact were friends with the
Germans; were friends with the Japanese; were friends with the Italians;
and were friends with almost everyone we defeat and even people, like
the Vietnamese, who politically defeated us. Think for a minute whos in
the Axis of Evil and whos not. No Germans, Bush didnt say better get
that axis of evil, nor those German Nazis, those Japanese militarists, those
Italian nationalists. No, he said the Iranians. Well, we really had unnished
business from 1979 and all of these subsequent utopian efforts that prom-
ise that we were going to engage them might in fact soon lead to the nucle-
arization of Iran and something quite nightmarish that will be the logical
fruition of that war almost thirty years ago. Who else was in it? North Ko-
rea. Whatever your feelings are about North Korea its a classical Roman
instance of a bellum interruptum. Its not a sexual term; its just a war that
was interrupted and never allowed to nish. And, yes, we were surprised;
yes, a million Chinese came across the Yalu River. But you could make the
argument that by late 1952, or early 1953 the Americans had mastered the
art of war in the Korean peninsula and were on the move again and only
politically it was considered wise to stop while they were on the advance
again. But that stoppage left a war to two or three more generations, and it
may leave a much more dangerous war if Korea is to become nuclear.
Of course, Iraq was in the axis of evil. We didnt just have just a Gulf
War; remember, weve had four Iraqi wars. We had Iraqi War One, which
was to get Saddam out of Kuwait; but we didnt nish the job while he was
still there. So then we had war two, which was twleve years of 350,000 no-
y-zone sorties. On 9/11 the only country in the world that was shooting at
us was Iraq. And then we had a third Iraqi War, which was the three-week
war, and now we have a fourth Iraqi Warthat is the insurgency. And that
problem with Iraq at last will be over, either when we pull out and just say
that we cant deal with that and were never going to go there again, and
were defeated and thats resolved for our age at leastor we stay there and
create some type of consensual government that lessens this phenomenon
of perceived grievance and the perceived grievances are aired out with a
free media and adjudicated in debate and legislative action to relieve that
tension.
Its important again to realize that war tends to nish when one side
wins and one side loses. Just look for a second at the Middle East. We had
the 1947 war, we had the 1956 war, we had the 1967 war, we had the 1973
war, we had the 1982 War in Lebanon, and more to come. Remember the
 Victor Davis Hanson 61

sort of logic to all of them. Notice we havent had an all-out conventional

war since 1982, and I think theres a reason. The real reason was either
Israel preempted or was attacked or after reeling for a couple of days, it
went back on the offensive sometimes longer. It took a week in the Yom
Kippur War, and usually the Soviet patron of Egypt or Syria, or Iraq, called
the United States up and said Okay, well call it off.
The United States usually argued and said, You didnt call them off
when you were winning; well stop it pretty soon. And then Kissinger
says, Well I couldnt hear him Dobrynin or some other minister very
well, we had static, and then he didnt call back for 24 hours. And then
he got right back on a clear line to the Israelis and said Go! Go! Go! I
can only give you thirty-six hours. And the answer was that the Soviet
nuclear deterrent would stop the natural conclusion of that war, which was
defeat and humiliation of one side or the other. After the fall of the Soviet
Union, I dont think the Egyptians or the Syrians or the Jordanians or the
Saudis are going to wage a conventional war with Israel, because theres
no Soviet Union; that may explain this madcap desire in the Middle East
now to nd a nuclear weapon that might function as a surrogate deterrent
for the Islamic war and thats what we see with Iran.
In other words, the war in the Middle East was never brought to its
logical conclusion. In fact, that war is almost emblematic of what were
speaking about tonight. But think also of the recent Intifadathat was
the result of lost deterrence and attempted against a conventional power,
but especially since there was a perception that Israel either could not or
would not ght back in an asymmetrical war. Why? I thought it was a
pretty good deal, the 96% of the West Bank the Israelis offered at Camp
David. The Israelis should have offered that and it should have been ac-
cepted as a solution, but there were enough people in the Arab world that
saw even that as a sign of weakness on the part of the Israelis.
I thought it was wise to get out of Lebanon, that was a quagmire. But
you could make the argument that in the press of the Middle East that was
considered a unilateral withdrawal. I think it was wise the Israelis didnt
reply to thirty-nine scuds, even when you go to the great mosque in Bagh-
dad you see that Saddam built thirty-nine minarets that represent each of
the scud missiles that went into Israel. There was a sense that Israel lost
deterrence; and to restore deterrence of course, you bring somebody out
of their horric past: you open the closet and bring out Ariel Sharon and
say, You have one thing to do, bring back deterrence and we will praise
62 War, Ancient and Modern

you and then when were done with you, youll either be dead or well get
rid of you.
Thats what usually happens with characters like that in democracies.
And so I think whether we like it or not war usually solves problems when
one side wins or loses; and if it doesnt, then the war is passed on to gen-
erations. It doesnt mean war is always going to break out. One side can
give up; they can have a change on mentality, but if a side does not change
its mentality, and it doesnt feel its defeated or humiliated, then maybe
youre going to pass on that conict to a generation not born.
Finally, why do we nd this truth so repugnant? I know that Ive been
speaking, and there are a few of you, even some of you in uniform, who are
saying, Who let this nut in tonight? I think part of the problem is that to
accept this tragic view of the way human kind works, you have to accept a
couple of premises, one, as the Greek historian Thucydides says, Human
nature is xed and unchanging. In the brief 2,500-year period of civiliza-
tion as we know it in the West, we have not really experienced a Darwinian
breakthrough in the human brain or human nature or human character. I
know that a lot of people in social sciences believe that increased capital
and new methods of computer science have somehow altered our brain
chemistry, and that were kinder and gentler people. But Im not sure thats
true of human beings in general. And thats hard for us to accept because
in some ways it suggests that theres always going to be somebody from
Burlingame with a $250,000 education with a wonderful life ahead of him
whos going to have to go back to the 9th century in some god awful place
and ght people who are not yet on the same page.
Second, the great promise of the enlightenment, the 5th century B.C.
enlightenment, but especially the 18th century enlightenment with John
Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, was that education and logic and learn-
ing can adjudicate problems because war makes no sense. Why would
people revert to their primordial selves to kill each other physically when
they can talk and use logic? This was sort of the subtext to Francis Fuku-
yamas End of History where we were approaching a mass democratic,
mass capitalistic, mass consumer world where we would all have shared
appetites and reason, and war would be outdated as hopelessly retrograde
and in the way of our appetites.
But until we get to the last enlightenment I think theres going to be,
whether we like it or not, a lot of people killed in wars that make no sense.
The only thing that we can do in the United States is accept that tragic real-
 Victor Davis Hanson 63

ity and talk as much as we can about peace and hope that we have global
agencies like the U.N., and then privately and quietly keep our military
very, very strong because were going to have to use it now and again.
Thank you very much, and Ill be happy to answer questions.

QUESTION: You mentioned appeasement very briey. Looking back in

history are there examples where appeasement deterred a war or prevented
a war?

Hanson: Well if we have some classicists they can correct me. But I think
that this all started out with twenty-ve pounds of gold to Attila, and it
got up to 200 and it helped a little bit. They kept him at bay for a while.
And the Venetians and the Florentines and a lot of Westerners had vari-
ous deals with the Sultans to pay money. If we can use that Danegeld idea
as the same as appeasement; I think that we see in our own lifestyle that
pretty much the American policy from 1979 through both Republican and
Democratic administrations was something like this: were not really in a
war with these people, they cant really hurt us; if we get some Americans
blown up, hey, they knew it was a professional army, they knew it was
dangerous going into the uniform and with the Marine barracks in Leba-
non. Thats part of hazardous duty, as long as the economy is booming its
not our problem.
That system was containable for a while but the problem is Attila
always wants more gold and Osama Bin Laden always wants to trump
the last terrorist incident. It seems to me that ultimately you have to deal
with somebody like North Korea or with Iran and the longer you wait, the
stakes get higher. But the problem with appeasement is its always an at-
tractive moral argument. The person who always wants to appease, stands
up as they did in the 30s to Churchill, that old guy on the back bench who
wants to bring us back to Somme and Verdunend of story. Im a very
utopian person, I believe in love and brotherhood. Lets have a League of
Nations, and somebody says Well, they just gobbled up Ethiopia and
they just gobbled up Manchuria, but we still dont want to revert back to
that World War I mentality. I think that the argument of appeasement has
always got the high moral ground until the catastrophe starts. Only then
everybody says they are not appeasers.
64 War, Ancient and Modern

QUESTION: I agree with you that war is ubiquitous on a national basis,

but in some division of that theres enlightenment. California does not
ght taxes because of the pursuit of high energy costs. Cal does not attack
Stanford because theyre different than we are. Why cant we do that on a
national basis?

HANSON: Well I think I answered that question when I suggested that

there was a difference between a grievance and a perceived grievance.
The anecdote for that is constitutional government and the idea that people
who have differences can air them; they can talk about them; they can
appeal to reason and thats part of the democratic process. Now theres
a great controversy as to whether or not democratic societies attack each
other, Athens invaded democratic Sicily in 415; Mantineia was a demo-
cratic state that fought Athens. But its very rare. Somebody will say the
Boers had a constitutional assembly; the southern Confederate states had
a House and a Senate; Victorian England had a Parliament. But still, more
or less its true in history that a full-edged democracy does not attack an-
other democracy because the people within those two societies are doing
exactly what youre talking about. But you get a Berkeley and you get a
dictator here who says theres no free speech and Stanford has always beat
us because they cheated and there a bunch of da da da . . . , and theyre
destroying our university and one more year of that and there wont be
anymore Berkeley; you could whip up your entire student body.

QUESTION: War is caused by lack of perception. World War II started

because the U.S. navy couldnt nd where the Japanese carriers were. The
war in Iraq started because of a mistaken perception of weapons of mass
destruction that didnt exist.

HANSON: Well, I would say World War II did not start because we could
not nd out where carriers were. With all due respect, World War II started
when there were twelve Japanese carriers and few of ours. World War II
started because Japan had twelve carriers and we had three or four in the
Pacic, and it ended when we had sixteen and they had none, and thats
just the way it is. Because we had lost the sense of deterrence all during the
1930s as the Japanese came on stronger. As General Yamamoto said when
he was in the United States, this nation of ours was a paper tiger. As far
as the weapons of mass destruction, I think that was wrong to privilege
 Victor Davis Hanson 65

that. I go back to the October 11, 2002, resolution by the U.S. Senate, and
the House followed and passed it the next day. There were twenty-three
reasons, and they were all listed as whereas and they were all legitimate
in my view. They were: whereas Saddam has broken the U.N. resolutions,
whereas Saddam has destroyed the marsh lands, whereas he has attacked
four of his neighbors, whereas hes committed genocide, whereas he tried
to kill a former U.S. president, whereas hes violated the no-y accords,
whereas he has weapons of mass destruction, whereas. . . .
I was curious about that and I went back and looked at the reaction,
if you go back and Google that, you know what you get? President Bush
is throwing the whole kitchen sink, hes trying to throw mud on the wall
and see what sticks. I think that it was a tragic mistake to say, Well we
cant do that; we have to focus on something that will scare the American
people when there were twenty-three legitimate reasons rather than trying
to hype one.

QUESTION: Im interested in the affect of war upon freedom in society.

I was wondering if you know of any other examples of ways in which war
has resulted in greater freedoms.

HANSON: Well, Im always struck by this argument that says you cant
impose democracy on anyone. I cant think of anybody who didnt have
it imposed or didnt achieve it through violence. South Korea has their
democracy through a war; Italy has it through a war; Japan has it through
a war; Germany has it through a war; we have it through a war. It seems
to me that whether you like it or not, and it happened that way in ancient
Athens, it seems that violence is sometimes a precursor to end an old order
and get a new order.
If youre thinking, is freedom often impaired during war time in a
free society, the answer is absolutely. I know that we are all worried about
the Patriot Act, but it pales in comparison to what this countrys done
so wrongly, interning the Japanese or rounding up German-Americans in
1917 or more yet, suspending habeas corpus in the border-states under
Lincoln or trying to shut down the New York papers during the Copper-
head movement. We have not seen any of that and yet this country recov-
ered from all that long ago. Theres always a worry that in war people in
democratic societies feel they have to suppress civil liberties wrongly and
usually react emotionally. Everybodys for suppression during war and
66 War, Ancient and Modern

then against it afterwards. But I do think Western societies have won their
freedom more so than not through warfare and violence, as sad as that is.

QUESTION: Have there been any instances in history when signicant

wars were regarded as signicant misjudgments? More importantly, if
such wars happened, how were they ended?

HANSON: There are thousands of wars in history that have been said to
have been started through a misjudgment, and I think of the famous lead
up to World War I where each side misread the others intentions. They
mobilized, and it reached the point of no return. Thats the locus classicus.
People have suggested that the Civil War started because of the Union
armys overreaction. The South didnt really want to do anything but shell
and humiliate Fort Sumter, and it was Lincolns last minute decision to
try and defend it when it was indefensible. But if you look at the larger
causes I think that this country would have eventually been torn apart over
slavery. That was inevitable, and the plantation class was the wealthiest
3% of any society in the history of civilization. The wealth that they had
accumulated was enormous, and there was no way they would give up the
source of it in slavery, it seems to me.
I dont think, given the nature of German militarism and Prussian
militarism in 1914, given the euphoria after the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, where they thought they could get an easy victory as they had ear-
lier, I dont think they thought anyone was going to stop them. I really
dont buy into this idea of Niall Fergusons that World War I was this
great tragedy and that the aristocratic classes destroyed themselves, and
they were both morally the same, and so could have avoided it all. France
and England were different countries, politically, culturally from Prussian
Germany. There were miscommunications over the German 1941 Russian
invasionthat Germany didnt have good intelligence about the Soviet
Union, that they really only knew of half the number of enemy divisions.
If Hitler had known that he might not so easily have gone into Russia. If
Hitler miscalculated after the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia, and thought
that he really didnt have to have a war following Poland, there was mis-
communication. But in 1939, Hitler went into that war because the Ger-
man army surrendered inside Belgium and France in 1918. The German
army was defeated but it was not humiliated and as soon as it walked back
out of France, the rst thing they said was that the sell outs at Versailles
 Victor Davis Hanson 67

stabbed us in the back, the Communists, the Jews. We are not defeated and
the proof is in the pudding: We surrendered in a foreign country and they
never set foot in the fatherland.
Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 because he simply had a basic logic
and it went like this: in 1914 it took us four years and we could not take
France, we took out Russia in two. 1940 we took out France in six weeks
and, given that logic, we take Russia out in three. And thats why he did it,
because they had lost the sense of deterrence, and he took the wrong lesson
from history. I dont think there was much miscommunication, but there
was a lot of failed intelligence.

QUESTION: In the beginning of your lecture you mentioned there have

been more deaths by violent wars in the last century than all other centu-
ries put together. And I would certainly agree with you on that, but I think
what also happened in this century was an enormous expansion of the
population, up to six billion people, and Ive heard other people quote the
statistic that if you look at the proportion of the population that dies as a
result of war it is much less in the 20th century than any century before and
thats because the population expanded by ve billion people.

HANSON: Yes, and we dont have very good statistics about war. I know
that in the Peloponnesian War, something I know about, more Athenian
civilians died than soldiers, probably 80,000 of them to the great plague,
probably only 25,000 hoplites and sailors. So thats a good point, but it de-
pends on the big question of the 20th century: how many people did Mao
really kill in China? Nobody seems to know that, and the number keeps
getting higher and higher. The subtext to that argument of course is that if
somebody had stood up to Hitler in 1939 or perhaps Stalin in the 30s then
maybe all of those deaths might have been prevented.
One problem we have in a utopian postmodern society is this idea
that if were not perfect, were not good or there are always good and bad
choices. Once you get to the situation where war is on the horizon theres a
bad choice and theres a worse choice. Just think of Iran right now. Theres
the bad choice of going in there and attacking by preemption and offending
the Russians and the Chinese and alienating the Europeans and stirring up
the Shia in Iraq and maybe destroying the domestic opposition that might
be rising who would now instead ock to a nationalist banner if we do that.
And then theres the other bad choice of not doing anything and allowing
68 War, Ancient and Modern

Iran to threaten oil producers in the Gulf, to threaten Israel, to threaten

Frankfurt, Germany. I cant see any good choices. I think thats usually
true of war, but only our generation, which is so leisured and educated and
afuent, came up with this new idea that says we can refute 2,500 years
of civilization because there is going to be a perfect choice and a lousy
choice. And theres always a lousy choice and a more lousy choice.

QUESTION: Theres good data to indicate that warlike or violent natures

of society are very dependent on the age structure of the population. And
indeed in premodern society all societies are youthful and that ts very
obviously with evolutionary biology. So what would you say to the hy-
pothesis that the way to achieve world peace is birth control and age heavy
populations?

HANSON: Well, I have a problem with that because that seems inex-
plicable in the case of Japan, which has an aging population that doesnt
seem nearly as bellicose as it did in 1930. That being said, if North Korea
establishes itself and sets off a Korean nuclear device, I will bet you that
Japan will make nuclear devices like Toyotas, and Im told they can make
4,000 a year. Chinas population is aging at the same rate as Japans almost
now, and I dont see any less aggression. The locus classicus is Europe
that would substantiate your theory. The European population is aging to
a little over a replacement rate of one child, its antireligious in the sense
its secular, and it seems to be pacist. My problem with the Europeans is
they go from far left to far right in the blink of an eye. After the Danish car-
toons, the French rioting, the murders in Holland, the bombings in Madrid
and London, theyre now talking as if theyre sailors at Lepanto again. So
I think that Europe, even though it has an aging population, is still quiet
capable in its 11th hour, of ghting if it has to.

QUESTION: Talking about Iran, do the rules of war really still apply with
a regime that talks about the necessity for the Apocalypse to arrive. The
new factor that seems to be in play here is the rationality behind people
waging war or not. Has the rationality for waging war or not changed?

HANSON: Let me say it again, I dont think anything changes. I think the
laws of war are super-annuated. Theyre predicated on human experience
and nature. I mean Herman Goering, just like some Roman age German
 Victor Davis Hanson 69

nationalist or medievalist, walked around with his pot belly and deer horns
and talked about some mythical Germanic past while he was in charge of a
very sophisticated Luftwaffe, but he was absolutely crazy. And you could
make the argument that when the U.S.S. Missouri went into Tokyo Bay,
there were people that wanted to kidnap the emperor and thought they
could still win. If you look at Osama Cho, the kernel of the Cherry Blos-
som Society, what he said made absolutely no sense and helped to lead a
hundred thousand on Okinawa to their deaths for these mystical beliefs.
Nobody thought that a sophisticated industrial society like Japan would
revert to Kamikazessome bankrupt idea of Zen Bushito Buddhism.
So the irrational is always with human nature and its really not in-
cumbent upon us to think that we have to invent a new dialogue. All we
have to worry about with Iranthese are the parameters: this man may be
crazy, he may have his hand on the button, but there will be enough people
around him to realize that his messianic vision of Armageddon will get a
lot of sophisticated people killed if we make it clear that there are certain
limits that you cannot cross.
Hitler, I think, as crazy as he was, understood that when he went into
Poland in 1939. His biggest rational worry was that the French army,
which outnumbered him in the West about three to one, might just walk
into Berlin, and they probably could have. What were learning about Sad-
dam before the war from these recent tapes is that for all his craziness
he was very worried and what made him even crazier in his beliefs was
that he really believed, and he had good reason to, that the United States
wouldnt invade because of the efforts of the E.U. and Germany and Rus-
sia to prevent it.

QUESTION: Youve spent the majority of your lecture talking in absolut-

ist terms.

HANSON: Well, I was just empirical. I said that there are certain assump-
tions about war and we can either follow them or not. Its up to us.

QUESTION: How do you factor in a modern exible response to war?

HANSON: Well there are always big wars, medium wars, and small wars,
and there always has been war. So the Romans dealt with Vercingetorix in
a very different way than they did with Hannibal, but it doesnt mean that
70 War, Ancient and Modern

the rules werent the same. They gured that even though Vercingetorix
was a Gaul from a tribal society, he operated on the same plane as a Car-
thaginian aristocrat like Hannibal even though he didnt have the same
type of resources that required a very different type of response. It was
counter-insurgency, it was frontier ghtingin a very different way than
a war of conventional annihilation.
The Romans are a good example because they fought multifaceted
wars of all different levels of response, but within each response there
were clear cut ideas that youve given him a green light, you havent,
youve had deterrence, he has a perceived grievance, its real, and all of
these things were the same as they are now. Basically the principles of war
apply to Osama Bin Laden or Vietnam or anything else. The response can
be big or small or amplied or attenuated but the rules remain the same as
long as human nature does. And thats hard for us to accept in the age of
computers and high tech weapons. Nothing in this war that we have seen
is new, not one thing. If you want to talk about Chechnyans storming a
school house in Russia and killing people, they did that in 413 in Mykales-
sos, a little town in Greece. The Thracians came in and killed every school
child and dogs and livestock. If you think its terrible theyre kidnapping
diplomats, the Athenians did that at the outbreak of the war. If you think
its terrible to go kill people in Iraq, round them up, shoot them, kill them,
the Spartans just took out 2,000 Helots and destroyed them. Limb lop-
ping? The Athenians cut off the right hand of everyone they caught so he
couldnt row. So as long as human nature is constant you will nd some
type of parallel somewhere in history. I nd that a great solace; its encour-
aging that were not alone, that we have history to teach us and guide us.

QUESTION: You put forth the idea that engaging in a war of ideology,
for the spread of democracy, etc., is a waste of resources.

HANSON: I think that the war with Islamic radicalism is analogous to

the war with the Soviet Union because we, meaning the West, have noth-
ing against people from the Middle East. And we had nothing against the
people in Russia. We had nothing against Germans or Italians. The people
come and go, but the ideologies are what make us like them or not like
them. Basically the Soviet Union was a totalitarian, murderous ideology
that had captivated about a billion people on the planet, and it was anti-
thetical to Western liberalism.
 Victor Davis Hanson 71

I think Islamic fascism, if I can use that term, is similar, in that it has
the ability to convince people that the source of all of their ills is not the
lack of democracy or an open economy or free trade or even indigenous
things that dont work as well in a modern complex such as polygamy or
gender apartheid or tribalism, any of that, but that the problem instead is
somehow past colonialism or America or the Zionists. And thats a danger-
ous narcotic, and people have to be disabused of that. I think the people in
the Soviet Union had to be disabused, just like they had to be disabused in
Germany. It doesnt mean you always have to ght them, but you have to
remain vigilant. So I see this as a war of ideology absolutely.

QUESTION: Earlier you suggested that the Germans returned because

they were defeated but not humiliated. In your opinion, what do you think
constitutes affective humiliation and what would be going too far?

HANSON: Well, I think if we take the case that you raised and that I had
raised, in 1918 the German people had to be told that their army, (A) went
on the offensive and started the war, and, (B) lost the war, and then they
had to see visibly the consequences of that. I dont buy that the Versailles
Treaty ipso facto was harsh. I buy that the Versailles Treaty was stupid be-
cause you did the two worst things you can do: you imposed a tough treaty
on a free people that remained undefeated. The key is to be magnanimous
to people who are absolutely defeated like we were with the Japanese and
Germans later, but you try to be too imperious to somebody when there
not defeatedand the German people did not think that they were de-
featedand wars follow. If you look at the German kill ratio vis--vis the
French and British, and the organization of that army, you could make the
argument that it did pretty well. The great 1918 offensive, the spring of-
fensive was defeated only with the entrance of a million Americans. But
had we let that war go on, I think another six months, the American and
British and French, they would be in Berlin and people would know that
they were in Berlin and then they would see the wages of their aggression,
and WWII would be less likely.
I think the problem we had with the 1991 Gulf War was similar: we
imposed a humiliating peace on Saddam Hussein. We occupied two-thirds
of a sovereign nations air space, thats an act of war. We did that for
twelve years, and we had this embargo that might have starved or killed
as many as a hundred thousand people, yet he was not defeated. His army
72 War, Ancient and Modern

was intact, we had never gone into Baghdad. So thats a prescription for
disaster, imposing a punishing peace on an enemy that doesnt feel he is
defeated and humiliated. The person in American history who is most mis-
understood, who grasped that, was William Tecumseh Sherman. Hes the
guy who went into Georgia and only killed 600 southerners on his march
to the sea. This was in the autumn when Grant was killing twenty thousand
up in northern Virginia. They hate Sherman to this day in the South, and
they dont hate Grant. Why? Because he humiliated them. It reminds me
of what Machiavelli said, A man can stand the loss of his father but not
his patrimony. And thats hard. Thank you very much.
About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at

Stanford University and a professor emeritus at California State Universi-
ty, Fresno. He is also a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media
Services. Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz
(BA, Classics, 1975), the American School of Classical Studies (1978
1979) and Stanford, where he received his Ph.D. in classics in 1980. He
lives and works with his family on their forty-acre tree and vine farm
near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953. He was a full-time
farmer before joining CSU Fresno in 1984 to initiate a classics program. In
1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in
Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the countrys top undergraduate
teachers of Greek and Latin.
Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly
papers, and newspaper editorials on matters ranging from Greek, agrarian
and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary
culture. He has written or edited sixteen books, including Warfare and
Agriculture in Classical Greece, The Western Way of War, Hoplites: The
Ancient Greek Battle Experience, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm
and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, Fields without Dreams:
Defending the Agrarian Idea, The Land Was Everything: Letters from an
American Farmer, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle,
Carnage and Culture, An Autumn of War, Mexifornia: A State of Becom-
ing, Ripples of Battle, and Between War and Peace. His newest book, A
War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Pelopon-
nesian War, was published by Random House in October 2005.

73