Read Victor Davis Hanson's remarks this past weekend. Here is the audio - not great, best I could do and it does get clearer as the din of the tableware quiets down - I have transcribed the first 10 minutes. I am working on the rest. Bear with me - the whole thing in one beautiful elegant basket of truth. Hanson is so elegant and ..... scary
UPDATE: Remarks transcribed - Q & A still to be done - huge props to KGS of Tundra Tabloids - who did most of it and fast.
Hanson remarks (link corrected): Download Hanson111608.wav
Hanson partial Q&A: Download hansonqa111608.mp3
Victor Davis Hanson November 16, 2008
UPDATE: NEWLY TRANSCRIBED AND CORRECTED - much thanks to Ralph
[11/23/2008 – Transcribed by Ralph
Blanchette]
Speech by Victor Davis
Hanson – Restoration Weekend, November 15-16, 2008
I think everybody's stunned, surprised,
anxious, frightened, terrified of the election. They don't know quite
what to expect, whether we are going to get Barack Obama, the Utopian
pacifist, the practitioner of moral equivalence, multi-culturalist
from Chicago, or you're going to get a retread Clintonite and if you
did whether that would be—given the dire circumstances that
some feel we are in—whether that would be a relief or
whether that would be cause of even more concern given the Clinton
record of the 1990s with the appeasement of terrorism.
It seems to me that what we're all
worried about is what does Barack Obama think about the world at
large—when he says that Iran is a small threat, and then he
corrects himself and says it's a large threat—when Georgia
is invaded by Russia and he tells us first that each side is of equal
blame and then he suggests Georgia prompted the entire crisis and
then suggests the UN should adjudicate it and then he suggests that
when an authoritarian country like Russia tries to destroy a
democracy its because of the precedent of an American democracy
trying to destroy an authoritarian regime in Iraq.
It's hard to make sense of all this.
All I can make sense of is, he has a very different view of the
world. This view is anti-platonic. And I say that, not to be
condescending, but Plato said that the natural order of the world was
chaos, it was war—peace was a parenthesis, it had to be
achieved and worked at. I think in the Obama view that men like him
that are charismatic, articulate, they can change the world because
it's naturally a peaceful thing until people like George Bush rush in
and through their stubbornness—"smoke 'em out dead or
alive" vernacular—destroys it, but the fact of the
matter is the only reason there is any semblance of peace and
tranquility in the world today is because in places as diverse as the
Aegean, planes over-flying in Greek airspace daily, where there's
near fighting on Cypress, or whether we are talking about the Korean
Sea and the Philippines and Taiwan and South Korean democracies not
going nuclear because the United States is there, or whether Russian
ships keep out of Norway every hour—all of that is
predicated on the presence of the United States.
To be frank, or to put it a different
way, Vladimir Putin doesn't give a damn that Barack Obama is African
American. And the Chinese autocrats do not hear very well "hope"
and "change"—it doesn't translate to Chinese very
well—and the Europeans don't care if he has a nifty jump
shot. All they want to know is half the world are vying to try to
take advantage of regional opportunities if the United States is not
there to stop mold, and to stop rust, which is the natural organic
order of the world. They take advantage of it and our friends are
there waiting to see which side to join. All of our friends in Europe
know that, and Australia and South America. They don't have deities.
Nations don't have deities like Barack Obama, they have interests.
And their interests are predicated on who is going to win and who is
going to lose. Into that void comes Barack Obama.
Contrary to the rhetoric that the world
is falling apart, there actually are some advantages of being Barack
Obama now as president. If you look at the war in Iraq for example,
although Harry Reid said it was lost and Barack Obama himself said
that the surge would not work and it did work—he said it
would not work, now he says it does. There were eight times more
people killed in Barack Obama's Chicago last month than in Iraq in
combat—people in combat that were killed. That war
militarily has been won. It was won because George Bush—obviously
stubborn in support of the surge—all the generals that said
it wouldn't work—that's going to save Barack Obama a lot of
money. It's going to, as the original now detested neocons
envisioned—that it would help enhance American security. And
the cost of putting a hundred thirty thousand troops in a peaceful
Iraq is not that much more than it would be in Europe or elsewhere.
It reminds me, it's about a year ago today I was in
Iraq—[inaudible]—and one of the private
sheiks in the Anbar awakening said "Why do you want to leave? We
can do it cheaper than Ohio or Indiana" There's some logic to
that.
We forget even the energy price. We
have had the most precipitous drop in energy prices in the history of
petroleum industry, from a hundred and forty-seven dollars a barrel
to right around fifty-five. That translates into about a three
hundred billion dollar stimulus to the American economy. And it
translates into about fifteen to two-thousand dollars per year per
American family. But more important, for Barack Obama, that means
that most of our enemies of the world, that are petro-generated.
After all you take away a hundred and forty-seven dollars a barrel,
and Vladimir Putin is pretty much a thug. You take away a hundred and
forty-seven dollars a barrel and even the Iranians have problems
running six thousand centrifuges. You take away a hundred and
forty-seven dollars a barrel nobody is going to pay court to Hugo
Chavez's subsidized petroleum. So all of that is going to have
foreign policy ramifications that, if it's done right, would be very
favorable to Barack Obama.
But I would like just like to just
concentrate for a moment on one of the conventional wisdoms he has
offered. On three separate occasions he said we took our eye off the
ball by going into Iraq and therefore wasted our effort in
Afghanistan. That was echoed on two occasions by Joe Biden. I think
it's emblematic of how wrong he looks at the world, I'd like to
examine the thesis that we took our eye off the ball in
Afghanistan—and that's the remaining war now—by
going into Iraq. First thing to remember is that the reason the UN—or
at least the evocation of the UN as the reason to go into war was not
that much stronger in Afghanistan than it was in Iraq so, unlike Bill
Clinton who bombed the Balkans without UN approval and without even
Congressional approval—he never went to Congress—George
Bush went to the Congress, he went to try to go to the UN, and part
of his rationale—remember there were twenty-two reasons for
him to go to Iraq—part of his rationale among the
twenty-three—it was a violation of UN accords, a violation
of the 1991 armistice accords, and the problem with the
"Oil-for-Food." So there was a UN element invoked.
More importantly, the Coalition of the
Willing, if you count by numbers and nations, was larger in Iraq than
it was in Afghanistan. And to be quite frank, what does it matter
determining involvement in the fight in Iraq when you're not fighting
in Afghanistan? It doesn't make any difference. The only people who
really fought with us in Iraq, the Australians and the British, are
the people who were fighting with us in Afghanistan. If you look at
another common fallacy—"Iraq had nothing to do with
9/11." That's true in the strict sense, but remember, we're not
at war with Afghans, rightly so, we went into Afghanistan because the
Afghan Taliban offered sanctuary to Arab Muslims from the Middle
East, the real enemy, at least when you look at the people who were
killing us in the nineties, and the great facilitator of Muslim Arabs
in the Middle East was always Saddam Hussein. Look at the people that
we found in Baghdad when we arrived. Abu Nidal, Abu Abas, Mr.Yasin,
one of the architects of the nineteen ninety-three World Trade Center
bombings, still rolling around in Iraq—for all we know he's
still there— Mr.Zarqawi, the al-Qaida affiliated terrorists
that were battling us hard in Kurdistan. You could make the argument
that there was a better reason to go into Iraq, if you wanted to
attack the type of people who were responsible for 9/11.
And the fourth, look at—don't
listen to what I say, look at what the enemy says. In 2004 Bin-Laden
wrote that famous letter before the elections, saying that, the
central front on the war—the global war on terror, the
global war on Islam as he put it, was in the land of two rivers. That
was echoed and reiterated in 2005 by Dr.Zawahiri—he said
Iraq was the central feature there. And then look at the existential
question that is never asked. If you weren't going to kill—and
I don't know how you could, contrary to what Barack Obama says—if
you weren't going to kill radical Islamists in Pakistan—and
it would be very hard to invade a nuclear ally Islamic country—what
were you going to do it with? Seems to me the only way you were going
to do it was in Iraq.
And the point that I'm making, is when
you talk to the military, this year—our people-- the record
is seven thousand confirmed jihadists, insurrectionists, Bathists
that were killed. In the aggregate, there is a reason why we have not
been attacked—and part of the reason is a lot of people
flock to Iraq to join the global jihad and never came back home and
sent out the message "do not go to Iraq or you're gonna die."
And that was of some utility. If you think it wasn't, go take a look
at the Pew poll that was taken in May of 2007. Among the many
questions were asked, two were especially notable, one, "What do
you think of the tactic of suicide bombing?"—that was
at an all time low of twenty-six percent, and "What do you think
of the status of Bin-Laden?"—that has fallen in every
country except in the West Bank, from about sixty-five percent
approval rating down to the thirties. That's not because people like
George Bush in the least, it was because the stronger horse, supposed
stronger horse after 9/11 was shown to be pretty weak and was leaving
in defeat in Iraq.
There is another thing to remember
about that canard of Mr. Obama that "we took our eye off the
ball", and that is: this is the United States, this is a country
that just sixty years ago fought, what, three people all at once. We
fought the Italian fascists, the German fascists, the Japanese
fascists. Nobody said we took our eye off Japan, so we're stuck with
the Battle of the Bulge or we're stuck in Okinawa because we took our
eye off—by going into Germany. Germany and Italy knew
nothing in advance and did not coordinate with the Japanese at Pearl
Harbor. But for an earlier generation it was close enough that they
were fascists, they hated the United States and we were at war, and
they were all going to be defeated at once. It's very ironic for a
much more powerful United States in the present, warring against
radical Islam that does not have the resources of the Japanese
Imperial war machine or the Wehrmacht, to be told that we can't fight
one enemy, that we can't fight more than one enemy at once, it makes
no sense, at least to me.
How did this narrative get started? How
did this narrative of "taking your eye off the ball"—by
going into Iraq—get started? I think that there was a lot of
reasons. First, there was this naïve assumption because of the
seven week victory in Afghanistan, and the six months establishment
of political [inaudible] provisional constitutional
government, that Afghanistan was easy. Well people thought, you know,
wow, Afghanistan took seven weeks, and you have six months for a
government, Iraq took three weeks and suddenly we'll have a
government in three months. When that didn't happen, Afghanistan
became the good [inaudible] war and Iraq became the bad.
If you look at it historically, I think
that everybody would realize that Afghanistan always posed more
problems than Iraq. It was landlocked, it was surrounded by a lot
more enemies, it had no allies in the region so to speak, it had no
history of even a trace of secularism as Iraq did, it did not have a
port, and strategically, as far as the United States was concerned,
it was not of the same importance, and it was also the home of forty
percent of the world's heroin. So there was always a problem of going
into the ninth century versus maybe the sixteenth century in Iraq and
establish a constitutional government. That was lost in the hysteria
about Iraq.
The second thing is, remember how this
strange phenomenon emerged, that you have all these talks today, all
during the campaign we've heard that you have to go across national
borders and you have to surge troops as long as you do it in
Afghanistan and don't dare do it in Iraq. Part of that—that
anomaly emerged, and to understand it, I think you have to go back a
little bit to the exegesis of Afghanistan in the first place. After
9/11, there was this pretty much blanket criticism of the Clinton
administration, and the Democrats felt that dearly, and so then there
was the war proposed, remember, less than thirty days, George Bush
was in, on October seventh, he was in Afghanistan.
>I talked to the commander of the US
Kennedy, he said he turned the boat around and headed towards
Afghanistan, a great carrier class—a conventionally fired
carrier—the day of 9/11. He got the message that he was
right about four hours later. And George Bush was very calm in seeing
that day in going to war, and people in the Democratic Party were
really ambiguous about it. Columnists as diverse as Maureen Dowd and
R. W. Apple said peaks were too high, too cold, the Hindu Kush was
inhospitable, a burial ground, the British and the Russian empire
couldn't do it, there were some ambiguity.
Most—not all but
most—supported the war, it looked pretty well, and suddenly
the Democrats were looking at a pretty bad scenario in November,
2002, that this his war had gone very well in contrast to the
appeasement of the nineties and it wanted to get on board and show
that it had national security credentials. So the war and the lead up
to Iraq. I suggest, that you all sometime go to the YouTube films of
October 11th and October 12th 2002 and hear Harry Reid give a certain
speech about no need to worry about WMDs, that we were already in a
de facto war with Iraq given its violations of no fly zones, we
should have been at war much earlier.
John Kerry, I thought gave one of the
best speeches, so did Hillary Clinton. I like John Edwards, I don't
want to leave him out—he gave a good one. I like comments by
people like Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein at Time suggested Bush
might be a possible Nobel Prize laureate. When the statue fell, I
remember, Chris Matthews said we are all neo-conservatives now.
[laughter] [inaudible] that was before teaming up with
George Bush, [inaudible] Chris Matthews said. That was before.
The Democrats wanted to get in on this because they thought that they
did not want to be on the wrong side as they had been on the Gulf
War, they had elections coming up. And they fought with each other,
to be—to out talk the other.
Then the war started, and I suggest
that anybody go back and read the comments after the statue fell.
Seventy-six percent of the people supported the war. As the White
House correspondents said on that night, two people who had supported
the war were in the ante room where George Bush was talking—and
I can remember Joe Klein almost knocking me over to get to the front
so he could shake George Bush's hand and say that he has been for the
war the entire time. I debated him later, in 2006 at Columbia and
[inaudible] and I remember he said that "I defy anybody
to say that I was ever against [sic—i.e. 'for'] the war."
And I said, Joe, remember that they have Wi-Fi in the audience. They
can Google you when you're lying. [laughter]
In any case, then [inaudible]
it, we have the difficulties, we had the insurgency, people started
to make the necessary political adjustments, and then we have the
Shia revolution, the voting, the purple fingers, people making other
adjustments. But by 2006, the Democrats decided that it was now in
their interest to do two things. To oppose the war in Iraq, but not
to give up the credibility they have on national security. So then
the most amazing thing happened. Afghanistan, which they thought
would always be sort of [inaudible] and always be easier
[inaudible] sort of thing, and Iraq was going to be inevitably
be lost, [inaudible], it made good sense to say that Iraq was
the bad war, not because that it was amoral or unethical all the
way—though they did say that—but because you took your eye off,
sort of like that cartoon you saw, where someone put his palm on a
fellow's forehead and said let me at 'em, well that what they kept
saying about Afghanistan.
If you just had not gone to Iraq,
Barack Obama said, I would have gone into Pakistan and crossed the
border and hunt down Bin Laden. I remember four or five days they
were almost out bidding each other to be tough. And the irony is of
course, when you're duplicitous like that, it's something called fate
or nemesis and they're going to have an opportunity, because the bad
war has actually become the good war, and is essentially over , and
now will see, what Barack Obama will do. He already knows that we go
into Pakistan. The only difference is that we don't tell people when
we do. [laughter] Now that he's going to be president, he has
a good war and he has all the support he needs to surge troops, and
he's on record that nothing we learned about counter insurgency will
be of any utility or [inaudible] in Afghanistan, and he got
what he wanted there. It's very ironic.
I want to finish on a broader point and
that's the election. This was always going to be a strange election,
because remember that this is first time since 1952 that an incumbent
president or vice-president had not been on the ballot. So you have
an orphan presidency the same way Harry Truman had. So just as Adlai
Stevenson and Dwight D Eisenhower attacked Harry Truman, so John
McCain as well as Barack Obama of course attacked George Bush. It was
also the first time in my life, in my voting life, you could say that
a northern liberal senator actually thought that he was going to win.
Remember, the rule had been since John F. Kennedy, if you were a
democratic senator, from the north, whether it was John Kerry or
Walter Mondale or George McGovern, you were going to lose and like
the caucus, a governor. The only way the Democrats had a chance, they
had to have a cover, a conservative [inaudible] with a
southern accent whether it's LBJ or Jimmy Carter or Clinton. Here
someone who says I'm not only from the north, I'm also very liberal,
nobody thought that would be possible.
Second—third thing is we have
an African American on—it was a serious campaign unlike
Jesse Jackson, and a woman on the Republican ticket who was I think a
much more serious candidate than Geraldine Ferraro, and we have the
oldest candidate, John McCain. So all these precedents. I think—I
just got back from the National Review cruise and there was all this
acrimony in two schools, George Bush did this to us, or John McCain
did it to us, or it was inevitable, or McCain was ahead on September
14th until the financial meltdown.
My view is more that it is sort of like
a Greek tragedy. That is, that given the fact the incumbents, after
eight years find it difficult—the incumbent party would have
twelve years in succession, given the fact that we're in two wars,
given the fact that the meltdown in September, given the fact that
Bush is an orphan, so that your own party would be attacking itself
in a way that has not happened since 1952, given the fact that, it's
just in a very brilliant fashion, once Barack Obama made the critical
decision to disown everybody that had been among his most eminent
social list, and that means everybody from Bill Ayers, Father
Phleger, to Reverend Wright, Rashid Khalidi. And once he made it,
another key decision—although he had been voted one, two or
three in the senate as the most liberal member—once he
decided that he was so trusted in this base, that he could
essentially renounce his position on everything from nuclear power,
to coal, drilling, ICE and NAFTA, public financing, guns, abortion,
capital punishment, and run as a centrist, then I think it would have
been as hard for John McCain to beat Barack Obama as it would have
been for Adlai Stevenson to beat another fervent hero like
Eisenhower. You can debate this point with us. But it was like a
Greek tragedy in a sense.
But in every Greek tragedy there has to
be a Greek tragic hero. In this way, it was sort of George Bush. He
was our Ajax, wasn't he? He was inarticulate, he was stubborn, he was
almost self destructive in his single mindedness, he was at times
oblivious to criticism, inept at defending, but like Ajax, he saw
that he had a certain mission, that was to keep Americans—nobody
could say that they were safe after 9/11—safe, and he was
going to remove the two worst regimes in the Middle East and to try
the impossible and establish constitutional governments. And he was
going to do that no matter what. And everybody was going to abandon
him as they did Ajax, and they were all going to be impressed with
the glib Odysseus of our age, Barack Obama, who could out think and
out talk anybody. But a man you wouldn't want to have on a Homeric
battle field with you. And like Ajax—to finish the story—he
has to self destruct and he did, but that's not the end of the story,
because today we read about Ajax—and most of us who are
classicists like him a lot more than Odysseus—and you
remember Harry Truman, he went out of office with a twenty-two
percent approval rating, he was vilified as somebody who left the
Democratic Party. He fell on this crazy idea of containment against
this 'mythical' threat of global Communism, and twenty years later,
he was seen as a good man, and the same will happen to George Bush.
[inaudible] Thank you very much.
