Multilateral Mantras
The fantasies of the old world meet the realities of the new. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online London protesters. Big bombs dropping in Iraq. More lectures about Guantanamo. Angst from the French and Russians. Kofi Annan miffed. Jimmy Carter back home writing novels.
Loyalty, How Quaint
The timeless importance of an old quality by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Vol. 55, Iss. 22 Even in our postmodern age 19th-century ideas like patriotism, loyalty, and treason still cause controversy. The recent news that some Arab-American and Islamic translators and chaplains at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay were either openly sympathetic to […]
The Paradoxes of American Military Power
Strange new guidelines about the way we fight. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Critics now fault an American military that ripped apart Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait to Kurdistan in three weeks for its apparent inability to restore civilization in the sixth months after the demise of Saddam Hussein’s 30-year nightmare.
Then & Now
Battles change us and stay with us. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last of a four-part series excerpted from the introduction of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, reprinted with […]
Vet Bearing Gift
Two welcome rings. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third of a four-part series excerpted from the introduction of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, reprinted with Doubleday’s permission. Part I […]
Ghosts & Survivors
War memories of a man I never knew. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a four-part series excerpted from the introduction of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, reprinted […]
Never Forget
Victor Hanson, KIA, 1945. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a four-part series excerpted from the introduction of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, reprinted with Doubleday’s permission.
The Truth Will Set Us Free
What this war is not about. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online So far most of our intelligentsia have been more eager to explain what this war is not than what it is. Yet the conflict is not a hash-it-out in the faculty lounge, nor a brainstorm over a headline in the newsroom, nor […]
“Those Jews”
If only Israel and its supporters would disappear. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There are certain predictable symptoms to watch when a widespread amorality begins to infect a postmodern society: cultural relativism, atheism, socialism, utopian pacifism.
The Event of the Age
Iraq is becoming the deciding issue of our time. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Talk, yell, spin, flip, back peddle — so America’s elite pundits endlessly regurgitate the debate over Iraq. Most are terrified that last week’s gloomy prognosis will be proven foolish by this week’s relative absence of bombings — only in […]
The Vision Thing
Convincing Americans to stick with a crazy Middle East. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Various Syrian foreign ministers, speaking on behalf of a recognized terrorist state, recently warned Israel for fostering “instability” throughout the region by taking out the supposedly empty infrastructure of a killers’ training base on Syrian soil.
Legends of the Fall
More myths about the current war. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online “The war is against ‘terror’.” As a number of astute observers have reminded us, terror is a method, not an enemy. And we are no more in a war against it than we were once fighting the scourge of Zeros or the plague […]
What’s It All About?
Playing high-stakes poker like never before. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The objectives and methods of the terrorists and ambushers in Iraq are not hard to fathom. Their strategy is twofold.
Why History Has No End
Islamic rage and Western disunity show that reports of history’s demise are greatly exaggerated. by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal Writing as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the “End of History.” The world, he argued, was fast approaching the final stage of its political evolution.
On the Right Side of History
The hard truth won’t go away. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online At the end of this summer of our discontent, an array of Democratic presidential hopefuls, along with a number of restless pundits, are seeking to reclaim credibility after their mistaken prognoses about the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
These Are Historic Times
Is it to be Lincoln or Sisyphus? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online By May 1864, Abraham Lincoln was in real trouble. The spectacular victories of the past year at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were mostly forgotten — in the manner that we no longer talk much about the amazing campaign in Afghanistan or the […]
The Great Divide
Looking back on the fires of 9/11. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online So many things about September 11 have coalesced to define the attack as a singular event in American history. Three thousand Americans did not die in a fire, earthquake, or flood.
Hoping We Fail
Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is not hard to determine who wishes the United States to succeed in rebuilding Iraq along lines that will promote consensual government, personal freedom, and economic vitality: Hardly anyone. At least, few other than the Iraqi […]
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 […]