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New Commentary
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July 4, 2008
Reflection Day
These two truths should be self-evident.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
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 A rare collection of al Qaeda writings.
Islam according to Islamists.
Many never before translated into English.
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On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises.
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July 2, 2008
Gathering Storm
by Bruce S. Thornton
National Review Magazine
A review of Andrew C. McCarthy, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, Encounter Books, 2008.
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Bruce Thornton's Decline and Fall is a sobering analysis of a doomed EUtopia.
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Eight years before the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Islamic jihadists sent America a wake-up call that most of us slept through. On February 26, 1993, a Ryder van containing a 1400-pound urea-nitrate bomb exploded in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing seven, injuring over a thousand, and inflicting nearly a billion dollars worth of damage. As the subsequent investigation would reveal, a cell of jihadists living for several years in New York had executed the attack and were planning others against the U.N. building, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the New York headquarters of the FBI.
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June 30, 2008
Dreams from His Grandmother
Ten general-election strategies Obama can use to disguise his hard-left views.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
I think we are beginning to see the full measure of the Obama general campaign strategy, framed along ten or so key directives that can allow the election of the most leftward candidate in American political history.
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June 30, 2008
The Can’t-Do Society
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
We have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets.
Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of "thinking too precisely." His poor Danish prince lost "the name of action," as he dithered and sighed that "conscience does make cowards of us all."
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June 27, 2008
Security and Freedom
by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers
The Margaret Thatcher lecture delivered to the Heritage Foundation, June 3rd, 2008.
There cannot be freedom without security nor true security without freedom. The Greeks from the very beginning understood this symbiosis between the two, and framed the nature of the relationship — and occasional antithesis — between these necessary poles. The historian Thucydides, for example, makes Pericles in his famous funeral oration, talk in depth about the nature of democratic military service and sacrifice that are the linchpins of the freedom of Athens, and how any short-term disadvantages that may harm an open society at war are more than compensated by the creativity, exuberance, and democratic zeal that free peoples bring to war.
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June 26, 2008
Islam's History of Anti-Semitism
by Raymond Ibrahim
Washington Times
Is there such a thing as Islamic anti-Semitism? That is the implicit question that Andrew Bostom's new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, tackles. The regrettable answer that presents itself is not based on conjecture, political correctness, anachronisms or wishful thinking — increasingly the domains and paradigms of modern academia — but rather primary texts that speak for themselves. Dr. Bostom, whom I have met and who evinces a passion for the subject of his book, still manages to approach it objectively. A medical doctor by profession, he applies the scientific method and bases his conclusions on the data — as all scholars used to.
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June 24, 2008
The Politics of Predicting
The left has authored more atrocities than the right.
by
Terry Scambray
Private Papers
A version of this essay was published in The Fresno Bee, May 31, 2008.
Phillip Jenkins, respected historian at Penn State University, writes in The Los Angeles Times that there “is a sound basis in American political history” for predicting that the election of a Democratic president will cause “assassinations and bombings” by right wingers.
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June 23, 2008
Obama Promises Change — But What Kind?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
By this point in the presidential campaign, the public knows that a charismatic Barack Obama wants sweeping "change." While the national media have often fallen hard for the Illinois senator's rhetoric — MSNBC's Chris Matthews said he felt a "thrill going up my leg" during an Obama speech — exactly what kind of change can Obama bring if he's elected in November?
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June 22, 2008
Energy — the Non-Issue?
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
The following entries on The Corner are a collection of VDH's thought on our energy troubles.
I don't quite understand why one party or the other doesn't campaign on delivering more energy to the American people to lower costs, keep the world price down, and money out of the hands of terrorists, and to address U.S. debt and the falling dollar. There seems no contradiction between wanting nuclear power, clean coal, tar and shale, more drilling off our coasts and Alaska — and more conservation, more money for hydrogen, biofuels, more solar, wind, etc.
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June 20, 2008
Would a Jihadi by Any Other Name Smell as Foul?
by Raymond Ibrahim
The American Thinker
The terminology we use to describe our enemy in the war on terror matters a lot. A spirited debate is underway among specialists and in the press.
An op-ed published in the New York Times entitled "What do you call a Terror(Jihad)ist?", by P.W. Singer and Elina Noor, attempts to defend the recent State Department memo advising government personnel to refrain from using theologically-laden terms — "jihadi," "mujahidin," "caliphate," "Islamo-fascism," "salafi," "wahhabi," "ummah" — when describing Islamic radicals and their motives. Instead, generics — "terrorists," "extremists" — should suffice.
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June 19, 2008
Islam’s War Doctrines Ignored
by Raymond Ibrahim
MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard)
At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter Ltc. Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine — such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian and Plutarch — Islamic war doctrine, which is just as, if not more, textually grounded, is totally ignored.
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June 17, 2008
Do the Right Thing — Start Drilling
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
The other day in southwestern Fresno County, a poor part of Central California, I talked with a number of folks at a rural gas station. Most drove second- and third-hand pickups, large cast-off sedans or used SUVs. Their general complaint was twofold. They didn't have the cash to buy a new fuel-efficient Honda or Toyota. And they were now spending a day or two of their wages just to fuel their cars for their long rural commutes.
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June 16, 2008
Reply to Patrick J. Buchanan
Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com
Patrick J. Buchanan got upset that I wrote a column about the World War II revisionists, especially his book, and that of Nicholson Baker’s on the allied “crimes” of bombing German cities. I produce his column by paragraph and then comment in brackets.
In attacking my book “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” Victor Davis Hanson, the court historian of the neoconservatives, charges me with “rewriting … facts” and showing “ingratitude” to American and British soldiers who fought World Wars I and II.
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June 13, 2008
Iraq in Review
Is there anything left of the antiwar Left’s criticisms of the Iraq war?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war.
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June 12, 2008
Clarity, Courage and Culture
Few defend the West like Somali-born Hirsi Ali.
by Bruce S. Thornton
The New Individualist
A review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (The Free Press, 2007, pp. 353).
Our most dangerous weakness in the war against Islamic terror is the failure of cultural nerve afflicting many Westerners. Faced with an enemy passionate about the superiority and rightness of his beliefs, many in the West are riddled with self-doubt and guilt about their own. Individualism, rationalism, and personal freedom and autonomy are incessantly questioned or scorned by the same people who enjoy those goods and take them for granted. Perhaps that is why the most passionate champion of the West these days is a Somali immigrant woman whose life offers powerful evidence of the oppression and misery created by a clan culture and religion that sacrifices the individual to the collective.
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June 11, 2008
Gone, but Not Forgotten
Barack Obama and Rev. Wright.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
There is a general sense — after Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana — that the white working class is somehow illiberal, and so now the Obamiacs discuss, ponder, and fret over the “race question” ahead. But the problem is not, and has never really been, race, at least any more than it was in having a black secretary of state or Supreme Court justice or chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but simply the question of grievance.
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June 10, 2008
Euromania?
Some Thoughts from Ground Zero
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
It’s a Euro Thing
If one were to collate European criticisms of Americana and then compare them to reality in Europe, well, sure confusion results. Here are some thoughts about another visit these last two weeks in Europe.
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June 9, 2008
The Bad War?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Normandy, France — Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.
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June 6, 2008
When Success Is the Orphan
Some insist on turning a blind eye to the benefits of our efforts in the Mid-East.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Recent studies showing a decline in global incidents of Islamic terror have been interpreted as solely a Middle-East intramural affair.
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June 4, 2008
All About Me
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Here is how our baby-boom generation solves problems:
1. Recently, George Bush went to Saudi Arabia to ask the ruling House of Saud to pump more oil. That request had about as much chance of success as the Democratic-led congressional effort to "sue" the Saudis in American courts for their selfish "price-gouging."
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June 3, 2008
Plan for a Century
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Magazine
Review of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, by Philip Bobbitt (Knopf, 2008, 688 pp.)
Anyone who finished Philip Bobbitt’s massive, 900-page-plus The Shield of Achilles (2002) might not be surprised about the size and organization of its sequel, Terror and Consent — a 600-page-plus volume replete with book parts, chapters within chapters, Roman-numeraled subsections, bullet-marked sub-subsections, a conclusion, and a coda, all fortified with lengthy indented quotations, footnotes, and italicized passages.
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Books & Things
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May 3, 2008
Darwin & Co., Ltd.
Just how limited?
by
Terry Scambray
Private Papers
A review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. (The Free Press, 2007) which appeared in the Fall 2007 edition of Faith & Reason.
“Buy low and sell high,” is the proverbial path to wealth. But have you ever thought of an opposite pathway? “Buy high; sell low — Make it up on volume!”
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April 26, 2008
The Will to Reason
Can we expect rational man from tribal society?
by Bruce Thornton
The New Individualist
A review of Lee Harris, The Suicide of Reason. Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
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March 27, 2008
Radical Thoughts
Dr. Tawfik Hamid reveals life as an Islamicist.
by Raymond R. Ibrahim
Private Papers
This review of Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam by Dr. Tawfik Hamid (Top Executive Media, 2006) was originally published at ASMEA as “An Insider’s Thoughts on Radical Islam.”
Several singular reasons make Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam by Dr. Tawfik Hamid a welcome contribution to the otherwise growing lore on radical Islam.
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February 21, 2008
The Alchemist
Brother Tariq can’t turn his Muslim to Western.
by Bruce S. Thornton
Private Papers
A review of Brother Tariq. The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest, trans. by Joana Wieder and John Atherton (Encounter Books, 2008)
The moderate Muslim leader is the theologico-political philosopher’s stone that many in the West believe can reconcile Islam with modernity and thus transmute disaffected Muslims, ripe for jihadist recruitment, into tolerant liberal democrats.
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January 29, 2008
Twilight of the Nation-State
European transnationalism is a utopian dream, Pierre Manent warns.
Bruce S. Thornton
City Journal
A review of Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe by Pierre Manent, translated by Paul Seaton (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 130 pp.)
The European Union’s grand project rests on the belief that nationalism is passé, indeed pernicious.
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Pajama's Media Blog
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August 25, 2007
Answering Back...
Every once in a while, one must attend to business and reply to published critics. So here goes....
August 21, 2007
The Old Wisdom
Bush, Bush everywhere…
This summer — in between weekly encounters on radio and in print exchanges with those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome — I tried to get away, by climbing as many peaks in the Kaiser Wilderness as possible, and marveled over the relative emptiness of that part of the central Sierra.
August 12, 2007
Our Silly Modern World
Why Study Dead Greeks?
Someone just asked me that at a reception the other night, wondering why anyone would prefer to write a book on the Peloponnesian War rather than something more modern and readable.
August 6, 2007
High Noon for General Will Kane
In the classic Western High Noon, desperate Marshall Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, tries to rally the fickle townspeople, his deputies — and his own wife. They have to stand up to...
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Angry Reader
Editor's Note: In this section we entertain letters from the critics. Some readers are angry, some are not so angry, and others merely frustrated. |
February 19, 2007
VDH replies to this letter in bold letters after each paragraph or more.
Dr. Hanson,
Let me please start by saying that while I certainly respect you, I disagree with you on many issues. I am a fiscally conservative libertarian who absolutely despises the Bush administration, and the damage they have done to this country. I know you disagree with that stance, but it is an earned stance, in my humble opinion. I actually voted for Bush in 2000, but hated my decision soon after No Child Left Behind was passed, and it only got worse with the nonsensical invasion of Iraq. But none of this is the point of this email.
You posted on NRO that Democrats leading the country would lead to "unilateral surrender." Do you actually believe that Obama would just throw up a white flag and let radical Muslims take the U.S. over? That he would just walk away from Iraq without first taking full stock of the situation? These are all just ridiculous GOP propaganda talking points. Obama and Clinton are still Americans, and love this country as much as you and I. Just because their politics differ from yours (and mine, for that matter) doesn't mean that they are traitors and "want America to lose," as O'Reilly so succinctly puts it. Taxes will have to go up if we are to rid ourselves of the fiscal mess Bush has left us in. Bush has also given us unnecessary programs in his 7 years. Spending is way up under his leadership, yet I have never once heard you get on him for that. You never once criticized his total lack of military leadership. In fact, the only reason he changed directions is because of the sound thrashing that occurred in November 2006.
It makes me think you are now nothing more than a GOP mouthpiece, and I am sorry for that. George W. Bush is no more a conservative than many of the "Tax and Spend" liberals, and yet there is never a hint of criticism directed at him. That only serves to make matters in the GOP worse, not better. Just because the man pinned a medal on you doesn't mean you owe him. He deserves all the same criticism that you level at the democrats, yet he gets none. Is that the price of having a medal pinned on your chest?
I'm angry at the GOP. I'm angry at the partisan nature of this country. It's GOP before America now, and that is not what I served in the military to protect. It is, however, the reason that I am a registered independent now, and no longer a registered Republican.
Hanson:
Your angry letter is completely disingenuous.
1) The posting you refer to was hyper-critical of Bush I, St. Reagan, and Bush II, for all running up deficits and various lapses from national security to poor selections of Supreme Court Justices. No one has been more critical of Bush than I about deficit spending and aggregate debt. In the article you refer to that's why I liked McCain's points about an end to reckless spending. Did you see the title of the piece? It was called the "Current Mess" and talked about Republican scandal, deficits, tentative strategies in Iraq in 2004-6, and de facto support for open borders?
2) When we are in the middle of a war in Iraq, and both Democratic candidates announce that they are going to set a timetable and withdraw troops regardless of the battlefield situation — what would that be other than a surrender? And what about Ms. Clinton's charge that the senior ground commander in Iraq was essentially lying under oath ("suspension of disbelief"), or the endorsement of Moveon.org ("General Betray-US) of Sen Obama?
3) I was very critical of Bush on deficits, the pull-back from Fallujah, and other half-measures in Iraq, the comprehensive immigration proposals, and agricultural subsidies, as well as excessive spending like No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Drug Bill. That the Democrats wished more spending, an exit from Iraq, open borders, and more pork is no excuse.
4) Sadly, in this age of angry, shoot-from-the-hip commentary, your accusations are typical of one who reads something quickly and is confused, becomes enraged, and then levels charges without checking facts. But in your case it is even worse — since you seem unable to read: criticizing an essay critical to Republicans as not critical to Republicans.
We live in strange times in which the ability to jot down something breezily, make charges of insincerity or worse, and then emailing them off is considered either wisdom or neat. It is neither.
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