by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n Part III: Question and Answer<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Thank you very much, Dr. Hanson.\u00a0 We appreciate the historical sweep of your presentation.\u00a0 I would like to just open the Q&A with twin democracy questions. The first one regards democratization in Iraq and the Middle East, as a result of wars, and now as part of a programmatic policy by the Bush administration.\u00a0 There seems to be a Western impatience with the pace of democratization, the question of how long this will take, and what is the role of the West in the future of an Iraqi society that, without democratic roots, becomes potentially democratic.<\/p>\n Second, on the notion that democracies do not go to war with one another.\u00a0 You\u2019ve written about this recently.\u00a0 There seems to be a potential paradox coming, that as more Western-style democracies emerge, we could have a situation where war erupts between democracies for reasons that we\u2019re not accustomed to, because of popular emotions, or religion, or similar reasons. Please address that possibility, as well.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Well, the first case about Iraq and our impatience, that\u2019s characteristic of all Western societies.\u00a0 Democracies obviously want to vote the people entitlements.\u00a0 They want peace and tranquility and the people in control.\u00a0 We saw that in World War I, we saw that in World War II in America.<\/p>\n That being said, though, once democracy enters a real war they finish it \u2014 think about all our worries about body counts \u2014 that Americans can\u2019t take casualties \u2014 we were told that we had to bomb in Serbia because we couldn\u2019t take body counts, shortly after September 11, I read a column by Miss Toynbee in I think it was the Manchester Guardian, assuring us that the bullies of America could never take one casualty.\u00a0 And after all, we stayed on after most wars, we still have troops in Japan, we still have troops in Korea, we still have troops in Germany, we still have troops all over Europe.\u00a0 And the idea that we might be in Iraq five or six years, or seven years, would be at all burdensome to the United States.\u00a0 And remember also that the American troop build-up in the Middle East was rather late and a consequence of the 1991 Gulf war \u2014 in other words, we once had 10,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, which thank God are out of there, and we had beefed up our troop contingents in the Middle East because of Saddam Hussein.\u00a0 With his removal, I don\u2019t think it is hard to envision that we could get down to a level of 50,000 troops.\u00a0 In other words, the reason that we built up in the first place is gone and with a democracy there, we might not need to stay in force \u2014 we get to a situation where we have no more troops than we did during the 1990\u2019s.\u00a0 I have this strange idea about wars, that for all the rhetoric that wars are started over material grievances, shortages of natural resources, I rarely find that true in history.\u00a0 In ancient Greece people fought over worthless border land.\u00a0 And Thucydides, the historian, reminds us that\u00a0phobos,<\/i>\u00a0fear is what makes people fight.\u00a0 Sparta had no real legitimate grievances against Athens, yet it crossed the border in 431 because of fear.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the Falklands were of any material importance to Argentina, except power and status and influence and honor. There are 81 million Germans today in Germany with 10 percent less land than 77 million had in 1939, and nobody is talking about\u00a0lebensraum<\/i>.\u00a0 Japan has also more people and less territory, and we\u2019re not talking about a co-prosperity sphere.<\/p>\n In other words, what makes states go to war are what the Greeks callprophasis, a<\/i>\u00a0pretext \u2014 grievances, wounds that can be exaggerated or developed or hyped by autocratic leaders.\u00a0 The advantages of democracy are simply that with an open press, a transparent government and a voting electorate, people can discuss whether these are legitimate.\u00a0 We did this ourselves in the United States.\u00a0 We had an election and we had a mid-term election about this war.\u00a0 At least critics can vent.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s the hope of having these democratic governments, that when people say that Gibraltar is critical to the Spanish economy, or some rocks in the Mediterranean are critical to Morocco, or one island is critical for Greece and Turkey, that you don\u2019t have the autocratic machinery that turns something that really isn\u2019t critical into a matter of national pride or honor or status worth annihilating each other for.<\/p>\n This is the problem with the Middle East.\u00a0 We have an honor society where if you try to tell people in the Middle East that certain issues can be handled diplomatically and are not the end of the world, you seem weak or without honor \u2014 I think that\u2019s the heart of the Israeli conflict, if you say that more Muslims have been killed in any one year by other Muslims than by Israel, it doesn\u2019t matter because Israel is a concrete, reified reflection of Western presence in the Middle East.\u00a0 It\u2019s right next to Palestine and has a larger economy.\u00a0 And for those who disagree violently and say, no, it\u2019s the West Bank \u2014 well, it wasn\u2019t the West Bank in \u201947 and \u201956 and \u201967.\u00a0 In other words, we have these ostensible logical concrete reasons to go to war, but I think throughout history it\u2019s more often more salutary to look at the underlying frustrations or grievances that tend to be more emotional than rational.\u00a0 And democracy seems to be an antidote to that.<\/p>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 We\u2019ll open the program to questions from the audience, and we\u2019ll start here on the left and sweep across to try and get as many questions in as possible.\u00a0 Please wait for the microphone, and if we can ask each of you to please identify yourselves, we\u2019d appreciate that. \u00a0Thank you.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 Stephen Capp at USAID.\u00a0 I\u2019m curious to know your views on how the term democracy is very casually and imprecisely used and abused both by friends of freedom and the enemies of freedom. The Soviets used to talk about true democracy, the North Koreans and the Cubans do it today.\u00a0 And I think what we in the West mean by democracy is the assortment of principles that you alluded to in the beginning.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lot more than voting.\u00a0 It\u2019s freedom of expression, separation of church and state, gender equality.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very broad range of ideas, and I think out of convenience we keep putting it under the rubric of democracy.\u00a0 I want to know if you think it matters.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 I don\u2019t.\u00a0 That word democracy is a very late word in the Greek vocabulary.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t appear until about the 450s I think in a play of Aeschylus.\u00a0 They first use the word\u00a0isogoria\u00a0<\/i>instead of\u00a0demokratia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>But the Greeks themselves were confused; Aristotle in his \u201cPolitics\u201d has a whole discussion of what makes a democracy and he has four types of democracies and four types of oligarchies and he says that they overlap in different places.\u00a0 It\u2019s sort of like pornography \u2014 we can\u2019t define it but we know it when we see it.<\/p>\n My view about this is we all know that Saddam\u2019s election was not pure democracy.\u00a0 I would even go so far that my own institution I just retired from, the CSU system, when they sometimes on campuses voted something like 105 to 10 to oppose the Iraqi war, that\u2019s not democratic.\u00a0 Something else is going on because people felt under psychological coercion to vote.\u00a0 So we know that what democracy is.\u00a0 Usually you have to have a free press, absolute right to personal freedom of expression, as you say, gender equality, religious tolerance.\u00a0 And we know that there\u2019s going to be gradations of that.\u00a0 We know in our hearts that Kuwait is better off than Syria.\u00a0 We have to be careful when we lump all these countries in the Middle East and say they\u2019re anti-democratic or they\u2019re democratic.\u00a0 They\u2019re all in these evolutionary processes, but at some critical point we have enough intellectual strength to say that some countries have crossed that magical line and they\u2019re democratic.<\/p>\n You made a good point.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s funny that for all these systems that are anti-democratic \u2014 the People\u2019s Republic of Vietnam, the Federal Democratic state of Germany, the Soviet Socialist Republic \u2014 why did these anti-Western systems insist on using\u00a0res publica<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0demokratia<\/i>.\u00a0 In other words, they\u2019re parasitical on the West.\u00a0 They use that nomenclature because even in their dark hearts they know that that carries intellectual and moral capital.\u00a0 Otherwise they would just say, this is the Soviet empire, or this is the Soviet workers\u2019 paradise.\u00a0 But no, they always want to use Islamic Republic of Iran.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing republic about it because the candidates are pre-screened when they have these elections.\u00a0 And yet they feel, they insist on using a Latin word from the hated West because they understand that democracy is not necessarily culturally specific but it appeals to the natural aspirations of everybody.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s really ironic.<\/p>\n So I think we can understand when a country becomes democratic and when it\u2019s not for the people \u2013 there\u2019s a lot of criteria, and some cases will have gender equality but not so much freedom of press, and vice versa.\u00a0 Remember, it\u2019s not a static process.\u00a0 I agree with some critics of the administration who were worried here at home about our own possible curtailments.\u00a0 Democracy is never static.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fluid concept and it can be taken away as quickly as granted.\u00a0 It depends on the vigilance and the education of the citizens.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing \u2014 there\u2019s no reason historically or culturally why the United States has to be a democracy in 50 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s the world\u2019s oldest democracy of the modern stripe, but there\u2019s no reason it has to exist in 50 years, unless we insist that it does.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Annan, Americans for an Informed Democracy.\u00a0 I was wondering if you would be willing to comment about America\u2019s relationship with Pakistan and the Musharref dictatorship there, and the realities of\u00a0realpolitik<\/i>\u00a0and the war on al Qaeda.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 That\u2019s a tough question.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written some about that.\u00a0 We\u2019re backing a dictator who\u2019s one bullet away from Islamic republic and we\u2019re doing that because there\u2019s indications from what he\u2019s said and done and promised that there\u2019s going to be an evolutionary process.\u00a0 But on the other hand, we know that every time we back a dictator to the bitter end, whether it\u2019s the Shah of Iran or whether it\u2019s a Somoza, that we either get an Islamic opposition that comes into power or a leftist socialist.\u00a0 So I think the answer to that, we all know, is even though Pakistan is nuclear, even though it\u2019s the refuge of bin Laden, what we\u2019re trying to do is buy time by pressuring Mr. Musharref for a series of reforms, all the way up to the point where he says, stop it or I\u2019m going to give bombs to this or I\u2019m going to do this.\u00a0 Stop it.<\/p>\n But we\u2019re trying to push him to that imaginary wall so that when he goes \u2014 and he will go \u2014 there is a democratic opposition that\u2019s an alternative to Islamicists.\u00a0 And that\u2019s very hard to do.\u00a0 Especially it\u2019s hard to do, it seems to me, to ask American soldiers to die in the Sunni triangle for democracy in Iraq when you\u2019re subsidizing and supporting autocracy in Uzbekistan and Pakistan.\u00a0 But all I can say is that a foreign policy that was ossified in the Cold War because of a real threat of the Soviet Union is now in a process of evolution.<\/p>\n And as we evolve, we understand that in some cases if we go whole hog in democracy in the middle of a war, we\u2019re going to have problems.\u00a0 So what we\u2019re trying to do is find out what each particular country, their maximum resistance level is.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying that the administration is always consistent or can be \u2014 I\u2019ve seen things that are not that idealistic because into this equation we have think tanks that are backed by foreign money, we have defense contractors who have foreign contracts, we have former Washington insiders with interests, all of whom like the relationships they have with autocratic leaders.<\/p>\n All that being said, it seems to me that left and right, Democratic and Republican, at least there\u2019s a consensus that we\u2019re moving away fromrealpolitik<\/i>, not because we\u2019re na\u00efve and idealistic, but because we realize it\u2019s realistic, because it has to create some alternative for these people to vent and some alternative to jihadism, which hates democracy, as we know now from the proclamations of Mr. Zarqawi and Khomeini, the later Khomeini-ites in Iran.\u00a0 The Islamicists say openly they don\u2019t like freedom and democracy.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Will Amatrudich, Catholic University.\u00a0 You just mentioned think tanks funded by foreign money.\u00a0 Could you elaborate on that?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Well, I mean \u2014 I\u2019m talking about not just think tanks as institutions, but I\u2019m thinking that countries that are not democratic, like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait , who give monies to endow professorships or give monies in ways that were not completely transparent, but we know happens.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s irrefutable without listing which crown prince gave which money to which university, but I know that there are endowed chairs that have money from autocratic Arab governments.\u00a0 And the people who occupy those chairs are put under pressures \u2014 I mean, let\u2019s be frank.\u00a0 I\u2019m a member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.\u00a0 I understand that the motivations of people who give money to the Hoover Institution, even though they don\u2019t have to fit rigid guidelines of a conservative bent. I realize that even though, as I understand it, the political affiliation of the Hoover now is something like 30 percent Democratic, and perhaps 70 percent Republican, those 30 percent people who are Democratic, like myself, face the reality that we are not liberal Democrats, but centrists.\u00a0 We all do.\u00a0 The same with public universities.\u00a0 As a person who went to Stanford and UC Santa Cruz, I can tell you that the culture there was very liberal and the faculty members felt it \u2014 that\u2019s just a human phenomenon.\u00a0 So we need transparency to remind us of the nexus between money and opinion.<\/p>\n But it seems to me that this war, in the middle of a war, we should be careful when people are profiting from governments that are autocratic that we\u2019re trying to change or influence, because it\u2019s going to be almost impossible for them to be disinterested.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Stephen Shoreham with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.\u00a0 I agree with what I think is your ultimate thesis, that democracy is the worst form of government except when you consider all the alternatives.\u00a0 But I have a two-part question.\u00a0 The first is, how do you explain the ultimate failure of democracy in the ancient world, the fact that Athenian democracy came to an end, the Roman republic came to an end, and some of the most caustic critics of democracy in Greece were Socrates in The Republic, where he saw democracy, as well as its alternatives, as inherently unstable.\u00a0 And Thucydides wrote the Athenians might not have had the Sicilian expedition but for Athenian democracy.\u00a0 And the paradox of American support for democracy elsewhere in the world, but the United States is the great financial and military power and people gravitate toward the United States \u2014 at least those who do, face the paradox of favoring something that is seen as an external import and imposition, and the paradox of how does one who sincerely wants democracy in a country or region that has not known it, escape from the taint of collaboration with the United States in taking American money?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 That\u2019s a long question, but let me just say that minds greater than I have tried to explain the transition from republicanism to empire, at least at the federal level in Rome, and also that baffling radical change, say in the Greek city states, not just in Athens but other non-Athenian democratic states, say between 350 B.C. and 310, after Chaeronea and the onset of Alexander the Great.\u00a0 It seems to me that if I would correlate literary passages, or I could represent fairly the corpus of literature, there seems worry over excess and license. I\u2019ll just make one point about Plato.\u00a0 Plato was very critical of Athenian democracy, but both he and Aristotle lived in Athens and they lived in Athens because it was vibrant, it was intellectually stimulating, and that was a process of this radical democracy.\u00a0 So they didn\u2019t leave.\u00a0 They could have gone to Macedonia, they could have gone to Sicily and stayed, but they wanted to live in Athens.\u00a0 So they\u2019re products of democracy and yet critiqued it.<\/p>\n The second is if we look at the corpus of Athenian orators and we look at what people like the Roman novelist Petronius talk about, or Tacitus or Suetonius or Juvenal, then we start to see a similar complaint against liberal thinking or at least open affluent society, that it\u2019s very hard \u2014 the freer and wealthier each generation gets \u2014 to transmit those values of hard work and how precious democracy is and how hard it was to sustain this infrastructure.\u00a0 The Romans created this word for,\u00a0luxus<\/i>, license, decadence.\u00a0 And it seems to me that that\u2019s always the rub. Again, I don\u2019t want to evoke the German nihilists, but if you read Hegel or Nietzsche or Spengler, all these people kept saying that you take away courage, you take away strength, you take away idealism, when you have everybody going to Wal-Mart and watching Oprah.\u00a0 That was the traditional critique of democracy.\u00a0 So there is something to that, that people in the United States don\u2019t ever think that we live in a tragic world rather than a therapeutic one.<\/p>\n And it was never a question of going 7,000 miles to Afghanistan, the death place of the British empire and the Russian empires in Afghanistan, fighting in the winter at 7,000 feet during Ramadan with unreliable allies, with people like Iran and Syria in the neighborhood.\u00a0 And taking out that government in seven weeks and then implanting democracy where it hadn\u2019t been for 5,000 years, and doing all that and having people in burkas three years later voting.\u00a0 And in the middle of it, by week four, people were writing off the whole campaign as a disaster.\u00a0 In the West that is.\u00a0 And now some are saying it\u2019s no better than the Taliban.\u00a0 We hear that every day.<\/p>\n Why do they say that?\u00a0 Because the world they live in in New York or Washington or San Francisco is very insulated from this type of struggle.\u00a0 I find when I speak to different people, when I speak to farmers or I see mechanics, or I see anybody who has any immediate contact with nature or struggle or tragedy in their own lives, they tend to be more sympathetic to what the US military has to put up with and do.\u00a0 People who have, either by income or education or sophistication, beat the game, the nature\u2019s old game of getting away from our natural existence, they really do believe the world operates on the premises of the newsroom or an academic meeting.\u00a0 They don\u2019t realize what most people are doing.<\/p>\n I\u2019m all for reform in Guantanamo, but nobody who\u2019s criticizing Guantanamo has ever sat in a room and talked with jihadists, or had to deal with a jihadist, or had the responsibility to stop that man from killing innocent people.\u00a0 And that\u2019s what I think that traditional criticism of democracy is.<\/p>\n As far as the United States, this is a very hard question because as I understand it, more immigrants come to the United States than all other countries in the world.\u00a0 I live in the ground zero of illegal immigration and my hometown once was 6,000 people in 1975 and it\u2019s 25,000 now, and perhaps 75 percent of them came here illegally from Mexico.\u00a0 And I see people come from Mexico, starving from Oaxaca.\u00a0 My kids went to public schools.\u00a0 And after putting up with no running water, no toilets, victims of horrendous prejudice as Mixotec Indians, they are coming up to the United States, working, sometimes being exploited, but finding in many cases a middle class existence.\u00a0 And then their children immediately often in response put Mexican flags on their car, tattooing Mexico on their back, and very critical in the university of the very system that saved them.\u00a0 Yet when they go to Mexico to visit, they come right back.<\/p>\n And I think part of our attraction and dilemma is that the United States is the wealthiest, strongest country in the world.\u00a0 It\u2019s plutocratic.\u00a0 It\u2019s not based any more on race or accent or birth.\u00a0 If you have money, you get instant prestige.\u00a0 It destroys all hierarchy over the world, and so it creates this appetite for this freedom.\u00a0 People want it \u2014 the culture \u2014 nobody puts a gun to a Frenchman and says, go watch Arnold Schwarzenegger, or go to McDonald\u2019s or go to Disneyland.\u00a0 This was a free choice because this multi-racial dynamic society has one barometer of success, and that\u2019s money.\u00a0 And anybody can participate in it, and it tends to destroy class, privilege, hierarchy, religious, political, and it makes people scared to death, even though they want to participate in it.<\/p>\n So we have this schizophrenic idea of the United States. Take this latest Mrs. Nooyi, that was the CEO of Pepsi.\u00a0 Here\u2019s somebody who immigrates from India and becomes the CEO of Pepsi-Cola, and lives in upscale Connecticutt and makes $5 million a year, and the people I see every day wouldn\u2019t have a chance of having that opportunity, which was achieved by her own hard work.<\/p>\n And what does she do?\u00a0 She gives a lecture to Columbia school of business and says that of all the fingers in the world, Asia\u2019s this finger, America is the middle finger.\u00a0 Be sure you don\u2019t point it.\u00a0 And you want to say to her, wait a minute.\u00a0 Look at your company \u2013you either carry Coke or Pepsi, or for a small business if you have Coke, you\u2019re not going to have Pepsi.\u00a0 Pepsi-Cola is a cutthroat capitalist conglomerate, and she made her money and her prestige and her lifestyle and her privilege by participating in that cutthroat world, the same way Sean Penn makes it in the movies, the same way that Mr. Kahn, the cricket star in Pakistan made it in England.\u00a0 So these people all of a sudden come back and criticize the West, not in a constructive fashion but sarcastically, it\u2019s very frustrating.\u00a0 But it\u2019s because they\u2019re a part of this elite.\u00a0 We don\u2019t hear these frustrations from more average people.<\/p>\n Mrs. Roy the Indian novelist, she flies on jets all over the world and says the capitalist system is evil, and the West is evil.\u00a0 All you have to say in response is write in an indigenous language, stay in India, fine, we have no problem.\u00a0 But don\u2019t be parasitic and profit from the system you want to critique all the way to the point that you won\u2019t ever quite reject it.\u00a0 Very strange phenomenon that we have with such blessed unhappy people.<\/p>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Dr. Hanson, if your optimism about the US and the West in dealing with this jihadist problem is to prevail, we have some internal issues to deal with in the West at the same time, that is, this contradiction of the ability to prevail on the war-fighting and the international front, and the corrosive element within our own societies, if I hear you correctly.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 I think so, and I think it\u2019s a result of success and splendor \u2014 I\u2019m not saying there\u2019s not legitimate grievances against this system.\u00a0 As somebody whose twin brother just lost much of the family farm, it had been in our family for 130 years, I can see capitalism, especially corporate agriculture, is quite cut-throat.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t see my twin brother who lost everything farming, telling me that this is a sick society that has to be destroyed.\u00a0 Or it\u2019s the middle finger of the world.\u00a0 I really resent that, when elite people who have profited, not just by capitalism or democracy, but by cutthroat capitalism and luxury, and then they start to use that privilege to undermine the very system that other less blessed trust in.\u00a0 It\u2019s not salutary \u2014 there\u2019s one thing the Greeks knew that we don\u2019t, that the two worst emotions that a person could entertain, I think, and the Greeks tell us that, are envy and ingratitude.\u00a0 Both are words we don\u2019t have in our vocabulary very often, but we should remember that.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Wayne Merry, American Foreign Policy Council.\u00a0 You referred to the dilemma of the transition from republic to empire in the Roman case.\u00a0 The American republic was first founded to preserve and expand the liberties of its citizens.\u00a0 Would you address the dilemma that as the American empire seeks to promote liberty in other parts of the world we compromise the very liberties that we were established to guarantee, and that while we did that during the Cold War because of perceived threat to our very existence, that that\u2019s harder to justify now.\u00a0 Do we not now find ourselves seeking enemies to justify the extraordinary measures that we use rather than preserving the liberties that we have as a higher priority?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 That\u2019s a good question.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be empirical and look at, say, five or six actions of the US military in recent years.\u00a0 The removal of Mr. Noriega in Panama, the removal of Mr. Milosevic in Serbia, removal of Mullah Omar and removal of Saddam Hussein.\u00a0 What\u2019s odd about it is what followed wasn\u2019t the easy solution of an autocratic shah or a nice Sadat or somebody like that.\u00a0 There was the messy work of trying to create a democratic government.\u00a0 And so whatever the US military is doing, it does seem to be targeting dictators more than socialists, or more than elected leaders, and it seems to be leaving in its wake more democratic leaders.<\/p>\n I was struck by that \u2014 I just am reviewing right now Robert Kaplan\u2019s Imperial Grunts.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fascinating account of the famous journalist who\u2019s gone to some of these 140 military bases and looking at what the American military is doing in the Philippines, or in South America, places that we don\u2019t even know, the Horn of Africa.\u00a0 What\u2019s striking about it is that it\u2019s pretty predictable what they\u2019re doing.\u00a0 They\u2019re trying to train indigenous militias to represent a constitutional government and to avoid the excesses of everything from death squads to private armies and promote regional development.\u00a0 And you can critique that by saying they have no business over there.\u00a0 But the rationale behind it, as I understand it, is to promote this global system where people can trade freely, or somebody like Kuwait, who has no military power, won\u2019t have its enormous oil reserves taken.\u00a0 Or to allow Saudi Arabia to pump oil at $3 a barrel and sell it at $50.\u00a0 That\u2019s the system that we work with.\u00a0 And it\u2019s this slow system that emerged after World War II, free trade, safe sea lanes, international financial system, that has enriched most people in the Western world. In response, the U.S. military, when it sees potential problems posed by people, to be frank, who haven\u2019t benefited from this system, it\u2019s trying to do two things \u2014 not allow that outrage to become extremist, to destroy this system, but by the same token, understand where that outrage comes from and work with development, in a way that is, I think, different from the old calculus of just giving bloc money and backing a right-wing dictator as the alternative.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s a funny sort of empire.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like Rome at all.\u00a0 People keep saying Rome.\u00a0 We don\u2019t charge people for maintaining our troops.\u00a0 And the United States hasn\u2019t taken anybody\u2019s land since I guess 1898 in the Philippines and we have the most immigrants of any nation \u2014 I don\u2019t know of any empire that allowed 15 million people to come in through its borders unchecked like we did with Mexico, and it seems to allow billions sent from our shores \u2014 and I think it\u2019s good that we do, but we have $50 billion in remittances that leave the economies of the Southwest and go into Central America and Mexico.\u00a0 All these things that we don\u2019t talk about.\u00a0 We run up a $300 billion trade deficit with China, with Japan, with South Korea, in a way that the Europeans would not do.\u00a0 So there\u2019s a lot of insidious ways that the United States promotes things which we don\u2019t talk about.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Lambros Papantoniou, Greek correspondent. Professor, what about democracy in Kosovo, since the U.S. government in recent days supports the idea to create an independent Kosovo.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Well, I was in Greece during a lot of the American activity there and it was very strange that anger \u2014 I guess there was an Orthodox opposition.\u00a0 I notice also that anger here at home; we had an Armenian studies program at Cal State and the professors in that program were outraged about American interference.\u00a0 Russia was outraged, Greece was outraged.\u00a0 That was a very funny war because Bill Clinton did not get U.S. Senate approval, and he did not go to the United Nations in a way that Mr. Bush did get the Senate to approve 23 writs of complaint against Saddam Hussein, and he did attempt to go to the United Nations.<\/p>\n I guess then the problem was that the utopian E.U. had this vision that they had evolved beyond violence, and within the confines of Europe all matters would be adjudicated by reason and dialogue.\u00a0 And suddenly a man out of their past, Mr. Milosevic, begins to address historical grievances with violence, and suddenly within a decade 250,000 people were dead on both sides, and suddenly the United States comes in and puts a stop to it.\u00a0 And a very messy business.\u00a0 And now we\u2019re trying to stay on with peacekeeping.<\/p>\n But there is a thing worth addressing \u2014 America didn\u2019t start that war.\u00a0 America did not want to get involved in that war.\u00a0 America went in late and solved it through military force, and yet my European friends often raise that issue as something that we should not have done.\u00a0 If we had not intervened, I think the situation would be no different today than it was in 1996 in Sbrenica, or 1998 or whatever.\u00a0 It\u2019s an imperfect solution, but I don\u2019t know what the answer should be for the situation between 1991 and 1999 was \u2014 I don\u2019t know any way to address it other than what we did.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 (Off mike and inaudible.)<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Yes, I know it.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very difficult question.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0 Since you wrote your book,\u00a0Who Killed Homer?<\/i>, there has been a plethora of books on ancient Greece, and ancient Greek plays seem to be commonplace.\u00a0 There are four productions of Greek plays right now in Washington.\u00a0 Is that a revival of interest in the classics, and why is this happening if that is the case?\u00a0 And also, has the way the classics are being taught at universities changed since you wrote your book?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 I think there has been.\u00a0 I think in 1998 if a classicist could have shot anybody, it would have been me and John Heath because the theme of\u00a0Who Killed Homer?<\/i>\u00a0was that this important legacy from the ancient world was not being disseminated beyond classics departments, and the old concentration on philology, narrowness, did not lend itself to explication of the ancient world.\u00a0 And people with English degrees or history degrees had taken upon themselves to teach these courses more and more.\u00a0 And as a reaction to that, the field went into hyperreaction \u2014 I would call it postmodern.\u00a0 Foucault or Derrida spread theory-minded approaches to the ancient world, which were equally arcane and unhelpful.<\/p>\n And I think now we see that whether it\u2019s teaching Latin in high school or promoting the field of classics beyond the realm of the classics department, everybody is starting to see a consensus on what has to be done.\u00a0 But primarily because if it\u2019s not done, classics itself, which after all is based on the mastery of the Greek and Latin language and culture, is going to go the way of Near Eastern studies or Egyptian or hieroglyphics.\u00a0 The number of people who can read ancient Greek will go down to the number of people who can read hieroglyphics if we don\u2019t do something.<\/p>\n And that would have, I think, a profound effect on classical studies because ultimately all classical studies have to have a nucleus of scholars who understand the ancient languages.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have those people who read the texts in the original and understand the thought processes and the method of expression then they\u2019re not going to train people well to teach Western Civ or classical art or Greek literature.\u00a0 So I think we understand now that we must disseminate it, but the great problem is we have a value system in classics that says if you\u2019re an endowed professor of philology then you get as many classes off as possible and you let a graduate student teach beginning Greek.\u00a0 You teach a graduate class of six or seven, in theory perhaps.<\/p>\n What we need to do, and I think it\u2019s starting to happen, is our top classical scholars must reawaken love of the classics and say that the most important class that I can teach is beginning Greek or beginning Latin, and my success or failure as a classroom teacher will involve that class to introduce people into the language of Greece and Rome.\u00a0 Or at least introductory classes. It is a wrong idea that success in our field means that I\u2019m an endowed professor, I\u2019m a philologist or a theoretician and I\u2019m not going to teach any undergraduates.\u00a0 I\u2019m just going to teach graduate students in theory, I think that\u2019s bankrupt.\u00a0 Nobody believes it any more.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the emperor has no clothes.<\/p>\n I\u2019m cautiously optimistic that things are changing.\u00a0 I know that\u2019s a controversial explanation, but I\u2019m cautiously optimistic.<\/p>\n Another question?<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0 Fernando Narama, University of Maryland.\u00a0 I have a quick question.\u00a0 How do you feel about the political struggles going on in Latin America at the moment, what was happening in Ecuador a couple of months ago, what\u2019s happening in Bolivia right now.\u00a0 There is a lot of instability and, you know, brought about by indigenous groups.\u00a0 Do you feel as though these processes strengthen democracy, or do you feel as though these processes …?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Especially in Venezuela.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Venezuela as well, yes.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 I think what\u2019s happened is with the great democratizing movements of the middle and late 1980\u2019s and 90\u2019s, and until the breakdown in Argentina, we saw, especially in Chile, a spectacular rate of growth, openness, and we thought that Latin America was on this so-called Asian model to prosperity.\u00a0 Then whenever that happens the aspirations of people increase geometrically, not arithmetically.\u00a0 So people thought that suddenly in Latin America there was going to be parity with, let\u2019s say, North America or Asia very quickly, and that hasn\u2019t happened.<\/p>\n Part of that, I think, is because, as in the Arab world or in the Asian world, there are other traditions that pose a greater challenge for democracy and capitalism and take more time to evolve.\u00a0 And then there is precious time to evolve.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t do any good for somebody to be poor and told our process is evolving, when they can turn on their television and see people far more affluent, both in their own country \u2014 so rising expectations, but increased frustration.<\/p>\n What we need to see in Latin America is somebody to keep reminding people that the economy has to be based on the sanctity of title searches, private property, free presses, open elections, free speech, open markets, and that\u2019s hard to do.\u00a0 In the case of Venezuela you see all of this oil money and hope, even though we know that the solution that Mr. Chavez is following is not going to work because it\u2019s more or less the solution that Mexico took in the 1930\u2019s and 40\u2019s.\u00a0 That is, to take oil revenues, create a state-run oil company and distribute it and have a large government workforce.\u00a0 And yet those systems ossify and that\u2019s not going to be a solution.\u00a0 But in the short term it\u2019s hard to explain to somebody who\u2019s hungry that it\u2019s not.\u00a0 So I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 It\u2019s going to be a very difficult matter.<\/p>\n I think the best attitude at this point for the United States is to gently encourage people to avoid Venezuela and let it find the truth of its own error \u2014 I think the World Bank was a little bit too tough on Argentina \u2014 but not to go demonize Mr. Chavez. Better to say, if you want to have this paradigm, go ahead but this is where it\u2019s going to lead Mexico, and we\u2019re not going to bail you out, and then hope for the best.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 — Venezuela.\u00a0 As you said before, there are so many struggles in Latin America.\u00a0 Latin America is turning to the left.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Do you think this is maybe a failure of the democracy, or this is something has to do with the way the US is trying to enhance democracy in the country?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Partly it is that whatever the United States is for, a lot of people are against because we\u2019re big and proud.\u00a0 Where I live, the number of people in my lifetime who are coming from El Salvador and Nicaragua to California is just amazing, and so we have this strange thing that this supposed anti-Americanism in Latin America that\u2019s rising, but the number of people from Latin America who want to come to the United States is at an all-time high.<\/p>\n My view of it is the long term.\u00a0 It\u2019s like Europe.\u00a0 Europeans were convinced after World War II that the paradigm was there\u2019s not going to be any more need for military defense.\u00a0 Educated, sophisticated people can create a state that\u2019s generous with entitlements.\u00a0 People can have one or two or no children.\u00a0 There\u2019s too many nice things to enjoy and can be missed by child raising or sacrifice.\u00a0 This is where we\u2019re going to go.\u00a0 And bigger government, redistribution of income is the way to go.\u00a0 And now we\u2019re starting to see for various reasons in Holland or France, perhaps in Scandinavia and Britain that people now understand that that\u2019s not going to be the solution of limitless imposed egalitarianism.<\/p>\n I think what I see happening in Latin America is increasing leftism, increasing statism, and increasing falling in the standard of living vis-\u00e0-vis the economies of China or Asia or the United States or England or Australia.\u00a0 And then some retooling, re-examination within the democratic auspices like what\u2019s happening in Europe right now.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t mean that the United States has much to do with the answer since we didn\u2019t cause the problem \u2014 I just start with the premise that whatever the United States does, it\u2019s going to be criticized, at the same time American popular culture as manifested in fashion, entertainment, and immigration is going to be on the increase.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very schizophrenic thing.<\/p>\n When I go to Europe, I always tell my European friends, there\u2019s no rule that says you have to wear Levi\u2019s or go to McDonald\u2019s or watch American TV.\u00a0 Don\u2019t do it.\u00a0 Just save your own culture.\u00a0 And I tell my friends from Mexico, there\u2019s no rule that says you have to go into the United States.\u00a0 Just keep out if you don\u2019t like it.\u00a0 I tell my friends from Latin America, there\u2019s no reason you have to visit.<\/p>\n I think this desire for things American is rooted in the idea that we are now a multi-racial society that gives opportunity based on merit and money, and it\u2019s radically democratic.\u00a0 We have never seen a radically democratic society like the United States.\u00a0 I can go down to Wall Street and I can see somebody who\u2019s worth a billion dollars, and he looks and dresses just like somebody who doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 And with the Chinese in the game now, I\u2019ve never seen anything like it in the history of civilization, where people literally come from Mexico, they get a three-bedroom, two-bath house near my farm, they put $1000 down.\u00a0 They\u2019re not legal, they get HUD housing, they go to Wal-Mart, they can get credit with a Visa card, they have a Kia SUV, and they have the simulacrum of somebody in Palo Alto as far as say square-feet in housing.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing development.\u00a0 And yet I know that some of their children, when I talk to them, because of these increased appetites and expectations will be fashionably anti-American.\u00a0 It\u2019s the strangest thing.\u00a0 It reminds me of Roman elites that, after they went to Gaul, they put white make-up on, lead make-up and wore blonde wigs because they thought that Rome was decadent and the Gauls were natural people, even though none of them wanted to live in Gaul.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Stephen Hayes, U.S. Army.\u00a0 You touched upon Israel and the Middle Eastern perception of American presence related to that.\u00a0 Given the successful establishment of a democracy in Iraq, what do you think will be the impact on the neighboring countries, not only the government but the people as well?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Well, I think the problem in the Arab world is that, one, most people understand they do not want to live under a Taliban government or an Iranian government, or an 8th<\/sup>\u00a0century caliphate, and they don\u2019t want to live under a secular autocratic government, two.\u00a0 And three, they don\u2019t want to acknowledge that a democratic government that gives them parity with the West has anything to do with the West, or is the result of American initiative.\u00a0 It seems to me that\u2019s the three constants.\u00a0 They don\u2019t want Islamicism, they do not want autocracy, and they understand that the model is Western, but they do not want any American association.\u00a0 So that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do in Iraq, and that\u2019s what we see in Lebanon and we see the pressure on Mr. Mubarak and some of the reforms are going on in the Gulf.<\/p>\n So I think our posture, as I understand it, was to kill the terrorists and discredit them, remove these autocrats \u2014 because there was nothing quite comparable to Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.\u00a0 Nothing was comparable to them in that area.\u00a0 And then promote democracies in ways that keep a very, very low American profile.\u00a0 And understand that the more good that we do will not be appreciated but will be constructed as doing bad.<\/p>\n The biggest problem we have in this war, as I understand it, and I\u2019ve spoken at a lot of campuses all over the United States the last three years, is what I would sum up by this sentiment, which I really abhor but I hear it all the time now.\u00a0 Those people are not worth it.\u00a0 Let them be.\u00a0 It\u2019s sort of a mixture of left-wing isolation and right-wing realism.\u00a0 I think that attitude will lead to another 9\/11 because we\u2019ve learned that letting them be, or a Cruise missile, or saying that American diplomats are harvested with impunity or that.\u00a0 American soldiers can be killed, as if they knew what they were getting into, leads only to 9\/11.\u00a0 Khobar Towers, first World Trade Center, East Africa embassies, Marines blowing up, taking hostages \u2014 that\u2019s just part of the game.\u00a0 I think it only encourages them and loses the sense of deterrence and leads to a 9\/11.<\/p>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 We will have time for two more questions.\u00a0 I see a gentleman there, and then an arm up here.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 In your book\u00a0Carnage and Culture<\/i>\u00a0you discussed and spent a lot of time on the fact that Western armies seek decisive battle, sort of a singular conflict in the open.\u00a0 And you alluded to this briefly in your chapter on Vietnam, but you mentioned that one of the more effective strategies against that has been guerrilla warfare.\u00a0 Can you comment on how the fact that modern American training still sort of trains people to deal in decisive battle \u2013 you know, that their comments that American Marines in Iraq sort of shoot first and ask questions later.\u00a0 Given that mentality, how do you think that a Western military can deal with more of a guerrilla threat?\u00a0 Or also, how do they deal with the task of peace-keeping versus warfare, when it\u2019s the same people who have to do both?<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 It\u2019s very hard because democratic societies or consensual societies or affluent societies are very restless.\u00a0 They want to get over there and get back home.\u00a0 And one of the best ways to do that is to marshal American discipline, technology, as manifested in superior supply and firepower.\u00a0 They can destroy the enemy.\u00a0 We all know that.\u00a0 Rome did that, Greece did that, the Crusaders did that, Cortes did that.\u00a0 And we understand that other paradigms are not as effective in countering that conventional strength.<\/p>\n Hitler or Stalin\u2019s system can cherry-pick elements of Western culture within the Western paradigm, but ultimately will lose. That being said, enemies of the West come up with, as I said, counter-insurgency or encouraging dissidents in the West or inter-Western rivalry, anything to call off this monstrosity they\u2019ve aroused.<\/p>\n That being said, though, there\u2019s also this insurgent, terrorist alternative in the West, seen in two ways.\u00a0 The Sicarri were pretty fearful people that fought the Romans.\u00a0 Remember they would just take a Roman legionnaire and cut his throat and stealthily go to the next \u2014 and I don\u2019t want to explain at length the Roman answer, because you all know the solution they came up with to that \u2014 how they dealt with the Siccari was destruction of the great temple and selling off the spoils to create the Coliseum.\u00a0 We all know about the great Mahdi.\u00a0 He was a terrific challenge to the British empire.\u00a0 But whether you look at a Jugurtha or Mithridates all of these national liberationists, anti-Western people found out that the West was not weak and had these preferences for war \u2014 yes, but it was not solely confined by those protocols, because there was counter-insurgency, there were hearts and minds, there were special operation officers.\u00a0 We learn to fight their battles well it turns out.<\/p>\n And I think that that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing and we\u2019re doing a pretty good job, given the fact that Iraq is 7,000 miles away.\u00a0 It\u2019s the site of the ancient caliphate, it\u2019s got neighbors like Syria, it\u2019s got Saudi Arabia close by.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that anybody could dream a perfect storm worse than what the American military has to contend with over there.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing they do so well.\u00a0 I wake up every day and say, how did they do this today?<\/p>\n And then as far as occupation, this is very interesting because historically I guess you could make the adage that the ease of occupation is directly proportional to the degree of punishment, defeat and humiliation on the enemy.\u00a0 In other words, what made the occupation in Germany or Japan tolerable was the enemy knew they were defeated and humiliated.\u00a0 That\u2019s hard for a postmodern, sophisticated society who feels that the use of force is almost antithetical to their own aspirations.\u00a0 So if you take the three-week war, I think Maureen Dowd wrote a column mentioning me, something I wrote that seemed too harsh and Shermaneque, because after the statue fell I was very worried, because I said \u2013 I didn\u2019t mean it this way but it came across that way\u2014the we had not, as General Sherman said, made the enemy feel that he is defeated and humiliated, because whether it was the forces that did not come from Turkey, or maybe it was the global spotlight of the postbellum era, I was very worried because in the Sunni triangle, the heart of the Republican Guard, perhaps there was 200,000 people who were never defeated on the battlefield. \u00a0It would almost be like trying to liberate Italy without defeating any elements or killing any of the Italian army.<\/p>\n And when these who deserted went home and turned on Al Jazeera obviously and saw that the Arab world had mocked them, and they knew that no longer were the rules of engagement war in force, where if you walked out and tried to kill Americans, they were going to blow your whole house up, then it became easier to kill stealthily an American who was trying to build a school or lay electrical cable.\u00a0 And out of that realization then you had an enemy who never felt defeated, never felt humiliated, that would find resonance with a lot of people who otherwise wouldn\u2019t support them but it gave a psychological lift to see resistance.\u00a0 As I said, it\u2019s a very tough thing.<\/p>\n I was just mentioning, I was on the airplane.\u00a0 I had a long day, I was trying to get from Fresno here about 20 hours in the airport, just delays, and I was sitting next to a person who commented on the plane on something I\u2019d written, and he said \u2013 he was a World War II veteran \u2014 that we did this right in World War II and got it wrong now.\u00a0 And I said to him, just wait a minute before you criticize the military.\u00a0 What if Hitler in 1934 or 1935 had said, I\u2019m not going to have a conventional war.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to get 200 or 300 or 400 party members, SS operatives, send them all throughout the democracies of Western Europe, commit acts of terror, and then hand-in-glove with that I\u2019m going to have communiqu\u00e9s that say that Versailles was unfair, the German people were victimized, Western democracies were weak and decadent, the ancestral Germanic volk were always on the other side of the Rhine, they\u2019d never been contaminated by the disease of the West or of Rome.\u00a0 And always have the ability to deny that the Nazi Party in Germany was responsible for this.\u00a0\u00a0 And then pretty soon I think you\u2019d see that the West would probably have said, what did we do to deserve this?\u00a0 The Rhineland, all these things in some way go back to Versailles.\u00a0 This actually in some ways happened.<\/p>\n And then we would almost have to go for intercession with Italy and Franco \u2014 Mussolini and Franco as honest brokers who were trying to bridge the gap from the democracies and Germany.\u00a0 And then the United States would say to the German people, you\u2019re not an enemy.\u00a0 You have to be liberated from Nazism.\u00a0 And yet at the same time they would have a certain resonance with the terrorist acts of the SS because it\u2019s about pride and the defeat of WWI.\u00a0 All those factors would be very, very difficult to deal with, and yet all of them in some ways are brought to bear in this current conflict.<\/p>\n This is the most surreal war that I can think of in our history, where we don\u2019t really know whether the enemy should be liberated or conquered.\u00a0 We really don\u2019t know whether we want to fight this war or create utopia over there.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know how it\u2019s going to be fought from day to day.\u00a0 And the effort butts up against cultural relativism, political correctness, moral equivalence, all of these doctrines of the last 30 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s very, very difficult to fight this war.<\/p>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 I very much regret that this is going to have to be our last question.\u00a0 Please sir, and we can keep this concise and then we\u2019ll have to close.<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Randy Litton, George Mason University.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in your thoughts on the economic foundation of spreading democracies, especially through military means.\u00a0 In other words, there\u2019s a great cost.\u00a0 Wars are expensive.\u00a0 And the ability of the United States to maintain these military actions in order to spread democracy, and also what economic benefit do we get from militarily spreading democracy.<\/p>\n DR. HANSON:\u00a0 Well, as I understand it, we have been spending somewhere, depending on who issues the figures, somewhere between 3.5 to 4 to 5 percent GDP on defense and historically if we look at what the United States itself has spent, or what other societies have spent, it seems to be tolerable.\u00a0 I am worried about these larger issues, but I\u2019m not sure to what degree they\u2019re connected with these military operations because after all, in 1950-53, 70 percent of federal budget dollars went to defense and 30 percent went to social programs and I don\u2019t think anybody was really hurting in America.\u00a0 Today 70 percent of budget dollars go to social programs and 30 percent go to defense and we are hysterical.\u00a0 So I think it\u2019s sustainable, especially as the economy grows.<\/p>\n As for what do we get out of it, as I said I think it\u2019s this abstract idea that when a China starts to run up big deficits with the United States, at least it\u2019s not returning to a cultural revolution.\u00a0 Or it\u2019s less likely to be an adversary in Korea, or if Vietnam is starting to Westernize then it\u2019s not going to be the same problem that we saw maybe in Cambodia.\u00a0 The same with Thailand.\u00a0 Or in the Arab world \u2014 in other words, we\u2019re trying to promote a system that encourages global trade, freedom, individual rights worldwide because we think that replicates our own values and we have less adversaries in the process.<\/p>\n Now you can make a real argument that there\u2019s going to be a lot of people who are beneficiaries of this system, who will not have to have the intellectual, moral, psychological burdens of carrying it, especially in Europe, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of it, but find it\u2019s convenient to attack or to criticize or to caricature.\u00a0 And I think we see that in Europe, which was a beneficiary all during the Cold War and was not at all upset about American troop protection from 300 Soviet divisions.\u00a0 And when they disappeared suddenly, the United States became a real problem in the world.\u00a0 And yet when we try to tell our European friends, maybe it\u2019s time we came home, as I tell my German friends from the left, they get very upset about that.<\/p>\n So a lot of people want the United States to pay the cost to create and maintain this global system that doesn\u2019t like a Saddam or doesn\u2019t like the Taliban, or doesn\u2019t like a bin Laden, doesn\u2019t like a Zarqawi, all of these similar challenges to it.\u00a0 But they find it convenient to nuance, to nitpick the people who have the unwelcome task of sort of maintaining the system.\u00a0 It\u2019s all predicated on one thing, that the American people can be told and our leaders can articulate to them, that there\u2019s a long-term benefit, and psychologically they\u2019re not to pay any attention to the vehement anti-Americanism that comes out of South America, Asia, the Arab world.\u00a0 And as long as they can do that and maintain that balance, it will work.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s a Noam Chomsky on the left or a Pat Buchanan on the right, those people will be able to make an argument that we should go back to the way it was in 1914 or 1933.\u00a0 That\u2019s the American people\u2019s prerogative if they want to do that.<\/p>\n I know that people I grew up with in the San Joaquin Valley who kept going to wars and getting killed in my family all had that viewpoint, that America had no business in Japan, they had no business in Europe.\u00a0 Let those people be.\u00a0 Get out of Latin America.\u00a0 Just America for America.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I was brought up with.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a solution to a sophisticated world, and their own lives were in fact pledged to engagement abroad.<\/p>\n Thank you very much.\u00a0 I enjoyed it.<\/p>\n MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Dr. Hanson, I thank you for one of the more unusual and riveting presentations we\u2019ve had here, where we discussed ancient culture, modern warfare, political democratization, and political and cultural contradictions, domestic and foreign.\u00a0 Thank you very much for joining us.<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to let everyone here know that in October of 2005 Random House will publish Dr. Hanson\u2019s next book, titled\u00a0A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans fought in the Peloponnesian War<\/i>.\u00a0 We would like to invite you back to the Wilson Center for a book launch in the fall of 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Part III: Question and Answer MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Thank you very much, Dr. Hanson.\u00a0 We appreciate the historical sweep of your presentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[787],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-17U","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6374,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracys-dog-days\/","url_meta":{"origin":4334,"position":0},"title":"Democracy’s Dog Days","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media We all want democracy to thrive and flourish, but can it? The Obama administration was quite pleased that the anti-democratic Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had come to power through a single plebiscite. That confidence required a great deal of moral blindness, both\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Democracy"","block_context":{"text":"Democracy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/democracy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4147,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/with-hamas-victory-comes-clarity\/","url_meta":{"origin":4334,"position":1},"title":"With Hamas Victory Comes Clarity","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 6, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Unexpected. Terrible. Inevitable. Everyone has a particular take on the dramatic Palestinian election victory of Hamas. 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This moderated chat was conducted by the U.S. State Department International Information Programs.\u00a0 For more information, please click\u00a0U.S. Department of State's International Information Programs] The IIP article about this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2005"","block_context":{"text":"September 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/september-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3953,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/winning-the-iraq-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":4334,"position":3},"title":"Winning the Iraq Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 30, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"All of its many fronts. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The present fighting is part of a fourth war for\u00a0Iraq\u00a0: Gulf War I, the twelve years of no-fly zones, the three-week war in 2003, and now the three-year-old insurrection that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein. 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