Victor Davis Hanson calls himself a classicist which, to
most people, means he studied the old classics such as the Greek and Roman
eras, and he teaches them. But there is something else associated with the word
classic that blends nicely with what Hanson is doing. It is that he is a
classic case of someone that cannot communicate with his readers without
deceiving them – something he does deliberately.
He has done it again with an article he wrote under the title:
“America 's
Middle East Dilemma” and the subtitle: “Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the
long term without years of unpopular occupation.” It was published on June 19,
2014 in National Review Online. In addition to being a classic case of
deception, this article shows how an American classic – never discussed before
– conspires to confuse the American public to a level so serious, it rivals the
damage caused by the consumption of drugs in that country.
So let me begin with that American classic before I take up
the Hanson classic. Look at these two sentences: “Obama partisans are blaming
the Bush administration for going into Iraq in the first place. But
critics counter that Obama wanted out of Iraq before the 2012 election at
all costs.” Most Americans do not realize how much dynamite is packed in these
two sentences. But let me tell you, there is enough destructive power in them
to send an Iraqi or someone neutral into orbit.
Look here. When America
goes into Iraq ,
the engagement is between the Americans and the Iraqis who are the two main
players. Thus, any discussion about the matter should involve them both and no
one else. But this is not what often happens with matters that involve America and
someone because the discussion always degenerates into a couple of American
factions (usually one Left-wing and one Right-wing) bickering about who was
right and who was wrong. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton: What does it matter if
a couple of Americans decided to bicker about which of them was more responsible
for the destruction of Iraq and the killing of its people? The fact is that the
country was destroyed and its people killed by the hundreds of thousands based
on a false accusation.
Now the Hanson Classic. Here is another mouthful that can
send someone into orbit. It may not be as high an orbit as the first, but it
will be one nevertheless: “The result is that we have thrown away the work that
broke the back of both al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite[s].” What the author
should have done here which he neglected to do because it is his habit to
truncate history to advance his point of view, is to explain that al-Qaeda was
originally created, nurtured and financed by the American President Ronald
Reagan, and that the hostility of the Iranians toward America came about
because the Iranians elected a prime minister that the American CIA toppled
because he did not suit their taste. Had the Americans kept their noses out of
that region, none of what happened would have happened.
Of course, many other things did happen after that which
contributed to the development of the current situation, a reality that should
have told a historian like Victor Hanson he can only blame the current
situation on the main actors such as Reagan and the CIA who were originally responsible
for what happened, and not on the supporting actors such as Hussein, Maliki and
Qaddafi who were engendered by the situation. To paraphrase an old saying: Had
Napoleon not been born, he would have been invented – and so would have been
Hussein, Maliki and Qaddafi.
But really, did Victor Hanson not know all this? Of course,
he knew it. But he worked out an agenda he has been pushing insidiously with
almost every article he wrote. You can smell it if not see it in this passage:
“The administration can create mythologies about Islamic history, as in Obama's
unfortunate Cairo
speech...” This passage goes on and on for several paragraphs like the recital
of a litany of cultural horrors ... to end with this part: “Middle Eastern
violence and instability result from a complex brew of tribalism, religious
fundamentalism and intolerance, sexual apartheid, anti-Semitism,
authoritarianism, and statism.”