Victor David Hanson

November 03, 2006

Before Iraq- The assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online

What is written about Iraq now is exclusively acrimonious. The narrative is the suicide bomber and IED, never how many terrorists we have killed, how many Iraqis have been given a chance for something different than the old nightmare, or how a consensual government has withstood enemies on nearly every front.

Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan; and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the Gulf monarchies.
Continued at National Review Online
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I don't think so Mr. Hanson. The chattering class are not so "forgetful". They remember the Vietnam war and all the other unnecessary invasions of other countries by the United States.

"Losing heart and blaming others" is typical human behavior when illusions are destroyed. The masses in America wanted revenge after 9/11 so the crowd was in a frenzy, waving their flags and marching to war to the sound of trumpets and- Onward Christian Soldiers.

The crowd has come to their senses. If you live long enough you will see a new crowd in the next generation who fails to learn from history, and they to will go marching off to war with grand illusions.

Your writings often justify "our" wars on moral grounds. As a erudite historian you should know better than to promote war on humanitarian grounds. You will continue to write and get rich promoting war. Millions have died at the hands of humanitarians and their wars, as written so well by Isabel Paterson in her essay, The Humanitarian with the Guillotine.

As a young man I loved war. I was not a reader, but I was enamored with the propaganda movies of WW II. Later in life I began to read war novels and histories of war. I read the biographies of Hannibal, Caesar, Alexander the Great, and many more.

The more I read about war the more I felt drenched in blood. I started seeing all the nebulous excuses for war, but not the reasons. A fictional war, The Battle of Troy (The Iliad) originated years earlier over a single woman, Helen. WW I was over the assassination of one man, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which led to ten million dead, which led to the Treaty of Versailles, which led to WW II.

The war with Japan was over Japan's expansion, at the same time the United States and Europeanss countries had colonies and military bases throughout the Pacific and, military personnel in China.

The more blood drenched I became from reading about war, the more convinced I became that most wars could have been prevented with better negotiations and free trade. We rarely hear of failed negotiations by our "statesmen" using bravado and threats of, "We will bomb you back into the stone age."

Bilbo Baggins
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http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=38
By Isabel Paterson Reprinted from The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson, published in 1943.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. This is demonstrably true; nor could it occur otherwise. The percentage of positively malignant, vicious, or depraved persons is necessarily small, for no species could survive if its members were habitually and consciously bent upon injuring one another. Destruction is so easy that even a minority of persistently evil intent could shortly exterminate the unsuspecting majority of well-disposed persons. Murder, theft, rapine, and destruction are easily within the power of every individual at any time. If it is presumed that they are restrained only by fear or force, what is it they fear, or who would turn the force against them if all men were of like mind? Certainly if the harm done by willful criminals were to be computed, the number of murders, the extent of damage and loss, would be found negligible in the sum total of death and devastation wrought upon human beings by their kind. Therefore it is obvious that in periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object. When they are not the immediate executants, they are on record as giving approval, elaborating justifications, or else cloaking facts with silence, and discountenancing discussion.

Obviously this could not occur without cause or reason. And it must be understood, in the above passage, that by good people we mean good people, persons who would not of their own conscious intent act to hurt their fellow men, nor procure such acts, either wantonly or for a personal benefit to themselves. Good people wish well to their fellow men, and wish to guide their own actions accordingly. Further, we do not here imply any “transvaluation of values,” confusing good and evil, or suggesting that good produces evil, or that there is no difference between good and evil, or between good and ill-disposed persons; nor is it suggested that the virtues of good people are not really virtues.

Then there must be a very grave error in the means by which they seek to attain their ends. There must even be an error in their primary axioms, to permit them to continue using such means. Something is terribly wrong in the procedure, somewhere. What is it? Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants, would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions.

As the story has come down to us, the ancient Egyptians were enslaved by Pharaoh through a benevolent scheme of ever normal granaries. Provision was made against famine; and then the people were forced to barter property and liberty for such reserves which had previously been taken from their own production. The inhuman hardness of the ancient Spar-tans was practiced for a civic ideal of virtue. The early Christians were persecuted for reasons of state, the collective welfare; and they resisted for the right of personality, each because he had a soul of his own. Those killed by Nero for sport were few compared to those put to death by later emperors for strictly moral reasons.

Gilles de Retz, who murdered children to gratify a beastly perversion, killed no more than fifty or sixty in all. Cromwell ordered the massacre of thirty thousand people at once, including infants in arms, in the name of righteousness. Even the brutalities of Peter the Great had the pretext of a design to benefit his subjects.

Continued at; http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=38