VDH Watch 7: Someone else is watching Vic, too!

Harold Meyerson has an article out harshing on some of the most irresponsible pro-Iraq War pundits: Harold Meyerson, "Their War, Too", The American Prospect Online, Aug 14, 2005.

And what would a list like that be without our man Vic in it? Or, as Meyerson describes him, "Victor Davis Hanson: The Analogist Apologist."

He describes our masterful geopolitical strategist Vic this way (my emphasis):

Hanson has been called President Bush's favorite historian, and for good reason. Soon after 9-11, the San Joaquin Valley classics professor began writing regularly for The National Review, demanding we go into Iraq, imparting martial lessons from Greece and Rome to an America abruptly at war. In short order, Hanson became a fellow at Palo Alto's Hoover Institute, a dinner companion of Bush and Dick Cheney, and the most unswerving defender of administration policies - even the ones the administration barely bothers to defend.

Hanson, you see, knows things you and I don't. His considerable certainty as to the strategic soundness of the war has been rooted not just in supposition but in historical analogy. "In the same way as the death of Hitler ended the Nazi Party and the ruin of the Third Reich finished the advance of fascist power in Europe," he predicted in 2002, "so the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi dictatorship will erode both clandestine support for terrorism and murderous tyranny well beyond Iraq." Oops.

On his second try, Hanson foresaw an end to the strife once Hussein was killed or captured. "The Romans realized this," he wrote, "and thus understood that Gallic liberation, Numidian resistance, or Hellenic nationalism would melt away when a Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, or Mithradites all were collared, dead, or allowed suicide." Hanson is living proof that you can't take historical analogies to the bank.

It's nice to see that Meyerson is as impressed by Vic's historical anologies as I am.


And I didn't realized until I read this that our man Vic had invented a unique description of Rummy (my emphasis):

It was Abu Ghraib, though, that tested Hanson's true mettle as supreme apologist, and he rose to the occasion. "We do not know how many of the abused, tortured, and humiliated prisoners in the war's aftermath either belonged to the cohort of 100,000 felons let lose by Saddam on the eve of the war or were part of the Hussein death machine or themselves were recent killers who had assassinated and blown apart Americans," he wrote.

To Hanson, what Abu Ghraib imperiled wasn't America's honor or reputation for decency; after all, what dishonor attended the torture of prisoners suspected to be Hussein's thugs? No, the danger was that even conservatives had begun to call for Rumsfeld's scalp, threatening the architect of the war and the occupation that Hanson had defended with every analogy he could adduce. Desperate times require desperate measures, and it was not until Abu Ghraib that Hanson termed Rumsfeld "America's finest secretary of defense in a half-century."

Yep, that's our guy Vic: supreme middle-brow hack historical apologist for the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: vdh watch, victor davis hanson