It’s All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson, by Gary Brecher, The American COnservative
"(...) Now Hanson’s newest project, A War Like No Other, drags one of my heroes, the great Greek military historian Thucydides, into his seedy propaganda campaign. A War Like No Other is Hanson’s retelling of Thucydides’ great story of the Peloponnesian War, the grim 30-year struggle between Athens and Sparta. That’s a pretty conceited project, even for Hanson. (...)
But this book is even more confused than most of Hanson’s work. It doesn’t make sense at any level, from sentence to overall argument. What’s weird is that nobody seems to have noticed.(...) 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. (...)
One thing historians have learned in the two-and-a-half-thousand years since Thucydides wrote is that people change deeply from one time and place to another. (...) For better or for worse, modern armies just can’t do that any more. We kill lots of civilians, but if possible we do it from 30,000 feet, and we have to make it seem like we didn’t mean to do it. So when we’re facing urban guerrilla war, we can’t do what the ancients did—wipe out the place, kill every one of ’em.(...)
That’s why you don’t hear too much about urban guerrillas before the 20th century: before then urban guerrilla warfare as a strategy was civic suicide. We’re squeamish, and those classical dudes weren’t. If you doubt that, try reading the commemorative plaques Assyrian kings put up outside conquered cities. There’s one I remember—wish I could forget—that brags about how the king “flayed all the chief men of the town alive.” We don’t have that option. Not even Cheney really thinks we can just nuke Fallujah. I’m sure he daydreams about it, but it never gets “translated into policy,” as they say in D.C. (...)
The grimmest joke in the book is that there really is one parallel that holds up when you compare the Peloponnesian War to America’s military history. You bet there is. But here’s the kicker: it’s the one connection Hanson would never, ever allow into print.
I’m talking about the creepy way that our Iraq disaster resembles the Athenian invasion of Sicily.
When Hanson says, describing the preparations for the expedition to Syracuse, that the Athenians’ “[i]ntelligence about the nature of Sicilian warfare, and the resources of the enemies was either flawed or nonexistent,” you can’t help thinking of Bremer, Perle, the “cakewalk,” and the WMDs.
When Hanson talks about how the Persians sat back and watched their enemies to the west bleed each other, you can’t help thinking about the way Iran helped draw us into Iraq by feeding the suckers at the Bush administration fake intel via Chalabi.
Then they settled down patiently to watch. And they enjoyed every minute of the war, cheering when we blasted Saddam’s guys and cheering even harder when the insurgents started blasting our troops—with the help of new IED designs straight out of Tehran.
When Hanson talks about the way the Persians just reabsorbed the Greek colonies in Asia Minor after the Peloponnesian War had drained the whole Hellenic world of power, you can’t help but imagine the way all of Shia Iraq will be smoothly absorbed into a Greater Iran when we face facts and cut and run. (...)"
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