Phase Three?
The enemy is growing desperate. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online After the first two conventional military victories in Afghanistan of November 2001 and this spring in Iraq, the recent bombings suggest that we are now entering a third phase: A desperate last-ditch war of attrition in which our enemies feel that bombing, suicide […]
The Awakening
We need a clean slate in the postbellum world. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online What is a base? Is it something lke the facility in Saudi Arabia that enrages the local population, provides a rallying cry for unhinged Islamists, protects a medieval monarchy from an emerging consensual society in Iraq, and can’t be used […]
How We Collapse
The home front is more worrisome than the battlefield. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Democratic critics keep deconstructing federal reports about intelligence lapses that might have led to the tragedy of September 11. While they fault the administration — in some cases correctly — for an apparent lack of vigilance, they do not […]
Our Summer of Discontent?
Looking for symptoms of defeat by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The forces that win or lose wars are insidious, cumulative, and often hard to discern.
War Folklore
Don’t listen to the latest groupspeak. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Just as we migrate from Scott Peterson to Kobe Bryant and back to Jessica Lynch, so too did the snowy peaks of Afghanistan bow out to the sandstorm-induced pause in Iraq and that in turn to 16 words of the president’s speech.
The Corrections
Our rocky return to a much-needed balance in foreign policy. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The Greeks were fascinated with the need to adhere to the mean (to meson). The idea became commonplace that there was a sort of natural equilibrium in things that tended to pull events, emotions, and people themselves back […]
War’s Bitter Laws
The rules of war existed long before we entered Iraq. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Here at the millennium, the conditions under which war must be waged by Western states appear to be like none other in the history of conflict.
Old and in the Way
The American Street has sized up best the new paradoxes of foreign policy. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The events following 9/11 created an “empire” industry — millions of words written by pundits claiming that by intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq America was now a hegemon.
The Surreal World of Iraq
Let us thank our soldiers on this Independence Day. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online That are we to make of the last four months? In 21 days at a cost of less than 200 fatalities, the United States military ended the 24-year reign of one of the most odious dictators in recent memory […]
Winning After All
Despair is not an option amid the present chaos. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online For about ten weeks now, the headlines of our major newspapers blare out something like the following: “Iraq Attacks Hamper U.S. Reconstruction” or “Increasing Resistance to U.S. Efforts in Iraq.
An Indirect Approach?
Peace in the Middle East will not be won on the West Bank. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Since the time of the Greeks a hallmark of Western military practice has been the tendency to seek out an enemy, and then through superior discipline, shock, and technology, to smash him — thus obtaining […]
Gone But Not Forgotten
Making war and peace in the new post-Soviet world by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It has been well over a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet many, still caught up in past institutions and protocols of that bygone age, forget the degree to which the collapse of the Soviet Union […]
Middle East Tragedies
Pressing ahead is our only choice. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The images are jarring, the hypocrisies appalling, the rhetoric repulsive. Only in the Arab Middle East — and the Islamic world in general — are suicide-murderers operating and indeed canonized, even blessed with cash bonuses.
Back to the Falklands
If only we’d had a roadmap to peace in 1982. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online April, 1982 Secretary of State Alexander Haig today issued the State Department’s long-awaited “Roadmap” intended to end the dispute over the contested islands.
Postbellum Thoughts
Ideas from war’s aftermath. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online THE FIRST PEACEKEEPER DIVISION? The complexities of Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Iraqi War involved not just military challenges, but postwar reconstruction and global opinion-making as well.
Time Is on Our Side
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In between morbid reports on the Peterson murders, the media — bored and a little chagrined with the rapidity of the American victory — sought to find a salacious story in the looting.
Anatomy of the Three-Week War
It was more that we were good rather than they were bad. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In the aftermath of the incredible three-and-a-half week victory we should not post facto make the mistake of assuming that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessarily an easy task.
Our Western Mob
From the graveyard of Kabul to the quagmire of Iraq to the looting of Baghdad. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The jubilation of liberating millions from fascism and removing the world’s most odious dictator apparently lasted about 12 hours.
The Ironies of War
What we have witnessed is unprecedented in military history. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The Marines just rolled by the battlefield of Cunaxa, where in 401 B.C. 10,000 Greek mercenaries suffered one wounded in their collision with the imperial troops of Artaxerxes.
Yesterday’s News
Trying to take it all in. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We are not quite seeing the beginning of the end of our efforts, but rather, to paraphrase Churchill, the end of the beginning.