VDH Watch 17: Vic and the ancient Greeks win the Iraq War. Or not.

I'm always hesitant to quote anyone with whom I'm not already familiar that's writing in the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's magazine. But this review of our man Vic's latest book is too entertaining not to mention: It's All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson by Gary Brecher American Conservative, a review of Vic's A War Like No Other 12/19/05 issue.

I haven't read the book. And it's pretty far down on my reading list. I'll probably get around to it about the time Bush withdraws all US troops from Iraq. But here's part of Brecher's take:

Some of the other mistakes are on a whole different scale. Take the title, A War Like No Other. If Hanson believes that the Peloponnesian War was really so unique, why does he spend his first chapters making far-fetched connections between that war and every other war in history? If he wanted his title to reflect what he actually argues, Hanson should have called this book A War Like Nearly Every Other, Especially Iraq.

Yeah, Iraq - that war haunts this book, but the writing is so sloppy you can never be sure exactly what the link between the Peloponnesian War and our self-inflicted Iraq disaster is supposed to be. Hanson is fairly clear on one thing: ancient Athens equals contemporary America. But even though he says this over and over, it never really makes sense. This is typical of Hanson's work - the more often he says something, the more confusing and contradictory it becomes. He claims 9/11 was "our Peloponnesian War." But it wasn't: 9/11 didn't trigger a lethal plague, didn't kill a huge chunk of our population, didn't cause the fall of our country, and didn't involve naval war, sieges, pitched battle, or in fact any of the strategies of the Peloponnesian War. The only similarity I can see is that they were both bad scenes, man. Real bummers.

Yeah, sounds like our man Vic's M.O.: endless twists on an endless series of bad historical analogies.