welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Victor Hansen who's a farmer classicist and military historian he is a professor of classics at California State University at Fresno and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University he writes a column for the National Review Online and contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times among other publications his books include ripples of battle the soul of battle the Western Way of war who killed homer and an autumn of war welcome Victor welcome to our program thank you for having me where we born and raised I was born right where I am right now a little rural Hospital 15 miles in southwest of Fresno and I live in the same house that my great-great grandmother built and so my children are six generation two still live there and it's a farming family it is it was always a farming family and I farmed for a number of years and I still own some of the land it was divided up recently when my parents died but there's still 60 acres of the original 180 I own and what did the land produce when it was raisins ran tree fruit so my brother and I and my cousin from 1982 eighty six or seven and then they continue to farm they just sort of quit last year and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world I was very lucky I had very wonderful parents my father and my mother was a Stanford Law School graduate my father was a university of Pacific master's degree graduate and they were my mother was a judge and my father was an administrator but they lived on this farm so they gave us these so with antithetical messages one was don't think you're better than anybody else you have to get your hands dirty you have to work on the ranch but education is the only hope both about practically and spiritually so it's been both a gift and a burden to be attacked to this big piece of land can't really leave it you feel guilty when you're away but it's advantages as well but you never forget hard work hard manual labor I guess of that kind of enterprise know my mother as I said I used to go over with her she was meeting justice in central California and she would go with me at 62 and self plums and peaches at the Santa Cruz farmers market which we used to do so that was the idea that there had to be a balance between the physical and the abstract where did you do your undergraduate work way just opened UC Santa Cruz and my father said this is the closest UC and I don't want you to go to Fresno State and I had an older brother there and so I had a twin brother and said all three of you can go there and we'll buy a house and we saw one for $25,000 that had a payment of a hundred and fifty a month and so the three of us moved in and we rented out two rooms and that paid for education very good those were the days and and what what led you to classics well why did you choose that as a field was that in graduate school or raise it it was very funny I grew up this rural high school and I took as many advanced placement tests as I could and I didn't really know what they were so when I graduated I realized I had two and a half years of college credit so when I got over to UC Santa Cruz what happened was I didn't have to take any classes that I didn't want to and there was this student upheaval was just Indian it was 1971 and there were these wonderful classes from these Ivy League professors in Greek and Latin so I just started to take them my freshman year and I didn't have to take a GE and the next thing I knew I took four years of very narrow Latin and Greek language and literature and about halfway through that course of study that they advised me if I continued I could go to graduate school and the idea that somebody would pay me was new to me so I did it and so then you went to graduate school at Stanford in yeah at Stanford in a PhD and and as I was doing this I'm not being just practical there the message from Greek literature Euripides and Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides was tragic and practical and it wasn't the message that I was getting from contemporary American society so it was almost a refuge of sorts and what did you do your dissertation on well it was a theological II based program so everybody was supposed to be a textual critic and I did not want to reestablish the text for the hundredth time of a particular author so I wanted to study war and I would grow up on a farm and I had a thesis advisor who just arrived and said why don't you just study war during AG agricultural devastation of the Attic countryside during the Peloponnesian War and I did in as a sort of penance I had to have the first chapter of the logical study of all the Greek words for gravity and I you see asked me to come out with it and I came out in 1998 with a new edition mm-hmm and and that book is the the Western Way of war actually it's called warfare and agriculture oh I see okay and then I edited a book called hoplites and then I wrote the Western Way of war later okay okay and now so so what what is evolving here as you make this journey is is an interest in in classics a real knowledge of farming and so on but also an interest in war I get the sense that recollections of war from family members who had been lost as soldiers or for example your father who had served in World War two tell us how that that when I was growing up in this rural family and at Thanksgiving or dinner or every day there was that one in the table was my grandfather Frank who was gassed in the Argonne in 1918 and he had trouble breathing and then my father was next to him and he had flown 39 missions in a b-29 over Tokyo and then they would talk about Victor who I was named after who was killed on Okinawa and then there was Vernon who had been in the Aleutian campaign and everybody there had certain attitudes about Europe more hard work and that was sort of frame of reference but I was more bookish I guess so I would study these things they would tell me I'd come back at dinner and say you know well dad did you know on March 11th there was actually 742 b-29s and so it was a mixture of first-hand recollection with abstract study but you were interested it was yeah it's fascinated about human nature and conflict and especially war as an arbiter the ultimate disagreement is and at some time it had a utility that things were solved by war and just as I and my parents made us go to school in a very rough neighborhood it was about 75% of the people had just arrived from Mexico and the public school system so my father kept in graining it in us that when you were at the local schools it didn't matter who you were didn't matter how bright you or didn't matter you've got straight A's it didn't matter anything and when you got out in us on the school ground there would be people who would all the things that made you a good person good grades following the rules being polite they would hate you for it because they would see that as weakness or arrogance and that nobody would be there to help you and that you had to not only protect yourself but try to help people who were not able to protect themselves we I think I got a hundred lectures about bullies so I had a lot of fights when I wasn't very young and and I still live in the same neighborhood my children had to go to the same schools on there and they're much worse so so you're suggesting that even as a young person year the ideas that you had about the world were tested by reality I think they were because I saw a lot of things on the farm farming is the most dangerous of all occupations and I saw people maimed I saw my birth it happens what my brother cut his finger off the other year and that was constant injury and then going to school were fights and then trying to keep this farm was not it was not suggested that this was an economic issue people went my grandfather would say we'll see if you can keep it the way I did people will come and try to take it away from me so they had a world a Hobbesian view that nothing was static there were forces out there'd always wanted to take things and people who tried to stop them and this was a tension in the world and would never end it was this background conducive supportive - you're focusing on on Greek studies I mean would as you went through this literature as you mastered this material it I guess then it resonated with this experience the Greeks really did focus on agriculture and war and you know I noticed a couple things that everything in classics that had been written about war was written mostly in German in the 19th century and had very wonderful things that was discredited because of Germany's later performance in World War two and World War one even and then nobody had written anything about agriculture so because they didn't have any practical and as I started to investigate it I realized that Greece is about in the same bladder to the I grew up at it was a Mediterranean climate I knew a lot about vines and wheat and olive trees I knew I was interested in war and the field was wide open so I ran I remember going back to my one of the advisors at Stanford and saying there's not one title in the card catalog with a word agriculture and associated with association with ancient Greece since 1922 because that was trying to override their skepticism about studying that and then you left Stanford you went back to farming though you didn't practice your classics right away it was tonight I finished pretty quickly and I lived in Greece for two years doing the archaeological part of the research and I came back in 1980 and I had a brother who dropped out of medical school and another brother who was working with my and my grandparents had passed away my parents were living in Fresno and the question was if somebody doesn't run this ranch we're gonna have to sell it so the three of us ran it and we did a lot it was hid phone in decay during my grandfather's later years so we put a new irrigation system we built sheds we redid it and by 1985 unfortunately that was right during the agricultural collapse so I went and got a job I was lucky enough there was a university within commuting distance the good news the bad news was they've never had a classics program it was very hard to convince them they should be teaching Latin and Greek at Fresno State and so you you really established a program there was nothing there I I started off as a part-time Latin teacher mm-hmm the next year I offered Latin and Greek and I taught five classes a semester for probably eight years and then I was lucky to I hired more colleagues and now we have four people mm-hmm it's a very good program and but over time you became disillusioned with the study of classics generally in the United States and in fact you even wrote a book called with a co-author called who killed Homer I believe which I can show ya John Heath who is a student I had met at Stanford and he had started the same thing that I had done only in Florida and we had talked over the years about why it was that all the values that reflected Greek values a Galit arianism education practicality pragmatism and we're not being honored by the own the profession in other words it was becoming highly theoretical the key was not to teach it was to publish for narrower and narrower audiences it was not to use the clarity of expression that Greek sidin had embraced and it was careerist so we wrote sort of a die Treiber a critique about the profession why such a wonderful thing as classics was down to 600 majors a year and I think 4000 classicist throughout the country yeah and it had it had it in that tiny world of classics it was it had an earth-shattering affective you can say that because people we quoted research we quoted what people wrote and people became hysterically angry because the world really hadn't paid any attention to classics but now it was being discussed in larger venues and the only message that was getting out was our message mm-hmm and they didn't but they didn't think that was fair at all and why why did the Greeks still matter because you were you know focusing on the Greeks at a time when one could say that nationally we were in a sense losing our commitment and understanding of what Western civilization meant a couple of reasons historically there is no West before the Greeks even in Greece before the seventh century you have the dark ages and the Mycenaeans are not Western in the sense as we know it so this idea of what is consensual government wants capitalism wants freedom what's individualism what's secularism all of these ideas were not only apparent in Greece but they were discussed the contradictions of them is it good to have democracy is it good to dumb culture down to the lowest common denominator is it good to have religion as a state religion are as a coercive mechanism to to instill good behavior all of these things that we wrestle with today were discussed by people who in some ways were not confused by technology their empirical they just wrote down the world that they saw so I thought that message had been lost and then they had this as I said tragic view of the world that we all die we all go grow old and it wasn't the old ages of golden years or it wasn't isn't this wonderful that you know if you have a divorce oh you have a death in the family we can learn from this no no no it was it was bad and so there was an honesty and expression and attend you appreciation about tenuous life was and how appreciative you should be to have shelter and food now over these years you you were also focusing on being a military historian and and the Greeks had a lot to tell us about war that we were losing sight of in this post Vietnam era yeah I think what happened was that military history as a discipline was discredited after Vietnam and there was a few people John Keegan and England surely was one that wanted to look at it as a social cultural phenomenon I did and so I wrote a series of books that tried to suggest that this is the way that Westerners fight it's predicated on cultural and political assumptions this is how it relates to society and it's a moral in the sense that war itself is not bad it's the war particular wars are good or bad and I try to establish criteria for them so I wrote a series of books in comparative military history it was a lot of work because I had to go to Civil War or the Ottomans and I went beyond classics and and one of your major books was a book called the Western Way of war and tell us about what what you found there and I believe I read somewhere that one of the the things that had that led you that struck you as you were getting into these studies were there were notions about destruction of Greek farmland in warfare that didn't make sense to you because you were a farmer there had been this the standard opinion was that armies went in a story in like the cities of polybius would say they ravaged a land and they were trying to starve the enemy out but there were problems when I rien de I would see that say things see things like they came every year well obviously if they cut down all the olive trees there'd be no need for that and then growing up on a form I notice it was very hard to cut down an olive tree it's very hard actually to bring grain except for a brief window so I realized that there were physical problems with doing it and more importantly I started to see these psychological ramifications that it was a may a catalyst to insult the pride to instill anger and from that germ I began to reread Greek literature for the first time and asked wider questions why do people go to war and is it always because of materialism this is very unpopular because at this time in classics Moses family and other people were talking in very Marxist terms about material reasons and the idea that it could be in a Greeks way psychological or spiritual and about honor and fear and envy and jealousy was considered kind of crazy and in the Western Way of war you you actually helped us understand what Greek warfare was like in this period from 700 BC to 350 or 340 340 and and there was a real integration of the way of life of the soldier and the kind of war they fought and and the way it was fought tell us all about that well it was in a Mediterranean climate so there was a campaigning season that was predicated on the agricultural year you were a farmer and a militia man so you had your own responsibilities back home on the farm and so you couldn't be away from you couldn't we be awaiting your farm very long so usually it was a consensual government they'd have a majority vote so usually these two sides would meet by I guess convention they would mean a flat plain they put on this absurd heavy armor because they had like purposes they crashed together and then there'd be an artificial understanding that the one who won would establish a trophy and then the question would be resolved usually it was pretty worthless borderland and then as this got going people began to realize that it was both economical but absurd because one the army might have reserves or one we might have a big Navy or one Athens might have light-armed troops or it might not so it was kind of artificial when especially when he met the Persians and you saw that this was a whole different challenge so I was very interested in how this system unwound and the social ramifications of letting people fight who didn't own land who weren't citizen who were former slaves the question of utility versus efficacy or honor and I was very it was very interesting and and was there a corruption of the political system that had worked so well you know in this earlier period where was and there was also an honesty to it it starts actually with Athens that democracy that was not a landed oligarchy and I guess I could sum it up by saying who are you farmers to decide that the whole city-state should rest or fall within one hours ceremonial collision when we have other assets like walls that we can hide behind the walls or we don't have to come up with money or we can fight at night our we can poison the water or we can fight at sea or we can fight with arrows so you have all this literature from home or onward criticizing the slave criticizing the bowmen criticizing the spear thrower javelin throw and what was interesting is the more warfare became democratic and was not predicated on social class the more destructive it became and the more amoral it came but in this earlier period you there was a movement toward a decisive finite war which was very nasty but we put it into the matter yes I think that was important because that idea even though it was no longer an infantry battle survived in Greek thinking if you had a sea battle the point was to destroy the enemy's assets and this is important because there's a lot of other traditions the nomadic tradition of the Chinese tradition or the tradition in Latin America of ceremonial Wars of hostage-taking of anthropological explanations for calibrating but never or fighting a world where you or the indirect approach but the idea that when war is declared you find the enemy's military forces you find the quickest way to get there and destroy them and get home it's very familiar to us in America today as a military historian I want you to help us understand what a military historian does I mean what sort of problems interest you well there's the discipline and military history has clear-cut rubrics are subdivisions there's logistics those grand strategy there's tactics is what we call operational history about how divisions fight battalions or how horsemen fight and then there's sort of economic social military history gender race class as it pertains to war and all of these are traditional military history as military history came into its own it seemed to me that operational history tactical history strategy especially the experience of what it was like to fight this or were pushed away and we saw military history to be acceptable had to be social history so what I was trying to do was to bring back question of tactics strategy and the battle face of battle ii is john Keegan's term back into the mainstream and do it in a different way so they didn't I wasn't seen as just a Prussian military officer but seen as something that strategy our tactics or the experience of battle rippled out or it affected communities or it was not just an esoteric science one of your recent books which I think I have here is ripples of battle and let's talk a little about that as a kind of a case study and you focus on on three battles in important in history and you really begin this exercise with a quote from Churchill great battles change the entire course of events create new standards of values new moods in armies and a nation so this ripple effect and one in this book one of the the battles you focus on is okinawa and in the story you're you're telling there has really ripple effects within world war two beyond world war two but also among families your own families i was trying to show that there's something abnormal about a battle you put a bunch of mostly young men throughout history in a confined space and i can find time and the stakes are one's life they see ghastly things and those impressions then affect them for their long span of life in a way that maybe even getting married or having children are farming or buying your first car do not and that a lot of literature and drama and philosophy come out of that so i wanted to make that argument first and they have and it's not predicated just under numbers of dead I mean plague and earthquake kill people much more than wars do sometimes but they're not they don't involve these issues like culpability or preventability or human agency so I wanted to look at three of them a modern one in Okinawa a one in Shiloh and then a Greek battle at D Liam to show that the same issues were constant throughout time and space and in the case of Okinawa I had grown up with hearing about how this battle had killed this young Swedish American farmer kid farm kid at 23 just after he got his bachelor's degree in 1945 and nobody wanted to talk about nobody knew exactly how he and they were all dead now so I wanted to as a personal Odyssey reconstruct and explain how that death had affected all these people I know but then lead that as an entry into the battle itself and and this was your namesake the person you're named after him was a cousin it was my father's first cousin his mother died in childbirth and his father sort of left so he grew up with my father in they were the same age same height same it looked almost identical and they had joined the Marine Corps together and they had gotten in a fight with an officer and as punishment my father took the rap and they put him in these new experimental b-29s which turned out to save his life and to stay in the 6th Marine Division was if you look at the casualty ratios on that Okinawa of the 29th Marines it was a death sentence nobody knew that at the time so I was interested in how he died I knew that would be almost impossible because 83% of his battalion that went up sugarloaf hill was dead by the time he died and this being 58 years I didn't think there'd be anybody alive but I found actually seven people who saw were there when he died and this the Battle of Okinawa occurs toward the end of the Pacific War it's a major island right near Japan over 90 days the the Japanese lost probably a hundred thousand we lost twelve thousand soldiers maybe another hundred thousand civilians were killed so it was a really horrendous battle to take a well fortified island and and and the costs were and casualties were really quite heavy but it was important for moving on to Japan I think it was it was the idea that was a funny battle that it was start on April 1st and was ended July 2nd and then in 60 days later the war was over so the American people woke up and they really didn't know it was going on for two reasons one Franklin Delano Roosevelt died right at the beginning the battle and then Europe was liberated in the war was over in early May so what their attention was focused on Europe they didn't realize there would be 50,000 casualties 350 ships hit 5,000 sailors killed 7,000 Marines and Air Force this worst fighting of the entire war in fact there were killed days were Okinawa was the worst day for the Americans in World War two so that was that was striking and then what was even more striking is what the purpose of it was it was to get a gigantic island 350 miles from the Japanese mainland and why we today worried about the atomic bomb we didn't we have no idea what Curtis LeMay was thinking of bringing in the 3,000 b-29s and we're having rather than having to fly 1,500 miles from the Marianas they could fly three sorties a day and although they'd almost burned down the cities of Japan already they could do this day in and then why not bring all the b-17s in and even the b-24s and even the Lancaster's and his mad mind he had this idea of 15,000 bombers 350 miles from Japan it would have been a Holocaust mm-hmm and and I tried to just discuss that then also we worry about the bomb and the moral implications of that but the dropping of this yes in August but we don't we have completely forgotten that that generation asked different questions and that was we kill over a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers they and us together killed a hundred thousand Okinawans and then we had 50,000 American casualties and when this was all going on we had a bomb that was almost ready for production it wasn't tested in July so why didn't we just hold off and use this bomb and then we wouldn't have had out all these people did so there that generations call was not don't use the bomb but use it earlier and then I had an enormous effect on what we envisioned for Japan because there were suicide boats there were suicide submarines there were suicide battleships the Emoto and there was suicide of course planes there was suicide corpses and the Americans had never ever experienced anything like that he maybe would Jima look like a picnic but I could say that and the idea that there was still 12,000 kamikaze planes on the Japanese mainland and there a militia of 5 million people it would be staggering to see Okinawa replicated at a magnitude of say 10 or 20 so this really impacted on the decision about the you can't understand the dropping of atomic bomb unless you read about what went what went on in Okinawa and what the Japanese militarists said I mean they had written instructions that one man can take 10 out or take a tank and they had a year to fortify the island and it was designed by the Japanese to show the Americans that we can make life so horrible for you and you can't take casualties like we can that you better think about a negotiated surrender of ours rather than unconditional surrender and the military could stay in power with the threat that if you try to invade the mainland it will be another Okinawa and they were successful in that way so so in a way this is a first run for what we're now encountering in terms of suicide bombers in them yes because for two reasons one the tactic of putting a man in a plane and trying to blow up things or a person on the ground trying to do it and more importantly the whole idea that a Western affluent bourgeoisie society which cannot suffer the same degree of casualties as a militaristic society so make war so terrible that even though we lose ten times more than you do your loss is felt more grievously the only thing I can't quite understand about the Islamic fundamentalist who were terrorists that they didn't really learn the lessons as we saw the other day in Fallujah that the West always has a response to this now it may be horrific but it will draw on its capital its technology its discipline to come up with a remedy and the only thing that stops the full implementation of that remedy is usually a sense of self or moral restraint and something about suicide bombing is a liberating experience for a westerner when they encounter suicide-bombing it's almost as if these people are going to do this to us then there's no other way to win the war but to unleash the dogs of American militarism and that's what we did and they probably do it again if it happens again and you write that the pool of those who wish to kill themselves and service to a lost cause is finite despite professed fantasies yeah it's so funny that we had this idea there was every Japanese person wanted to be kamikaze in fact there was about 7,000 people and that did and most Japanese hated the tactic and after the war the people who had an augury that tactic were despised they had to finally get people out of the universities who were English majors of all things they had to intoxicate people today it's kind of nostalgic and even Japanese people look back and glory but not at the time and there was a finite number in the final kamikazes the biggest problem was in the latter days of the campaign they were not flying their missions and that and the fighters who went along with them were instructed to shoot them down if they don't go and I think you're seeing the same thing after three years in the West Bank that if you start looking at the profile of suicide bombers we're seeing a lot of people now who are under psychiatric help who are in a messy divorce that's impugning the honor that are caught up with adultery and so there is a finite number whether it's in Japan or the present-day West Bank who are willing to do that and if the West or whoever is against suicide bombing because doesn't seem to be a Western phenomenon if they're willing to recognize that and to put up deterrence and to wait it out and then to use its own advantages in a counter attack it's not successful when we talk about 9/11 and its impact on the United States I want to ask you you in in doing this research on Okinawa for this book you actually found someone who who sent you a memo I was talking to a lot of these people about how Victor Hansen was killed and one of the funny things was one of them said well didn't you get my letter well his letter was sent in 1945 so he went out and found an old letter than my grandfather's but he sent me a copy of it now he's 87 mm-hmm and he was 30 and then another one said well why didn't anybody call me when I had Victor's ring and I said what ring and he said well you know he was so proud of this Legionnaire ruling ring that he wore in training at Guadalcanal and I said no he said well he had a premonition he might die and he wanted us to take it back I said well what would he do he didn't know classics he said nobody had a Roman Legionnaire and I was a classicist so I was interested and him as well and then he muffled he said let me go off away from the phone I'll call you back he called me back a little bit later so I have it here and I remember now that I called your grandfather and he didn't speak English well and he didn't want to come to the phone and I have it and I'll mail it to you I didn't know whether it was age Orson allottee but sure enough this thing came and then I had pictures of him and you could see it on his finger and so they had cut it off as when he brought down he was bloated the next day and they cut it off his finger what came the mail and I put it on this so here it is this is almost Greek or mystical my word around my neck 24 hours a day and and that that history would bring you back to the personal yes yes it made it I remember the name of course I never met him but when I went to school my father went out to the bar and said here's his briefcase here's his baseball bat hmm here's his papers now your job is I don't want to talk to you about I don't want to know anything about it he couldn't talk about he just said you're supposed to be a better person well growing up in this small rural community every time I went to the doctor there'd be a very attractive nurse in the 50s or so he dated and said I was in love with Victor Hansen or I go I'd go meet some guy you know you're this guy was six - you're only six one you know he spoke Swedish you don't speak a word that kind of my whole life I was haunted by him and a wonderful person let's talk a little now about 9/11 did the 9/11 attack in some funny kind of way bring us back to the Greeks and and what they had to tell us I think so I think most people had thought that we were sort of at the end of history that globalization or westernization had created a uniformly affluent interconnected world and that in the United States during the 90s we had a booming economy we were sort of like a dog that was asleep and every time we hear these strange places like Khobar towers or Tanzania or first we'll trade or USS Cole it was kind of swatting a fly and the idea was almost well they're military people or they're diplomats that they can harvest a few that's not serious and then suddenly the worst attack on America as a precursor to war in our history more than Lexington Concord sooner Havana Bay Pearl Harbor it really shook us up and then the question is what what do you gonna do about it well we talked about a coalition government in Afghanistan we talked about Pakistani UN peacekeepers and suddenly out of the past we started to hear voices that would say no these people want to kill you and they're gonna keep killing you and you stop it and I either stop them or give up and there were a majority not a great majority but there were a majority of people united states i think understood that in a way that maybe Europe didn't you wrote awful man cannot be controlled brought off counseled reason with or reported to the authorities but rather must be hit and knocked hard to cease their evil doing if the blameless and vulnerable artist survive I think the point that we should keep in mind with all this is that there were thousands of Afghans that were killed hung tortured the whole species of I mean half of our species all the women in Afghanistan were relegated to medieval status and same thing in Iraq and every time some Westerner has embraced utopianism and the idealism of reason as the ultimate arbiter of disagreement somebody else less affluent less privileged pays for it with his life so actually the use of force if it's done in a legitimate way and it's done carefully and it's thought out can save far more lives than will be lost and that was just appalled when I heard people United States a make these predictions of millions of people would die in Afghanistan and the United States is culpable when we had watched this horrific regime destroy an entire country and had done nothing about it and finally when we woke up belatedly and we're doing something about it people didn't understand one of the ideas that that had developed you know after the Vietnam War was the notion well we we really as a democracy couldn't allow you know one American soldier to be killed I mean if if we lost one soldier that that the politicians had to run for cover because the the people would turn them out I would like for you to talk a little about this the synergy between democracy and war because the fact of the matter is it often can cut the other way in other words that when you have a functioning democracy that are that confronts a situation like 9/11 that not only can it marshal the technology and the resources but it but it can can really rally forces for a real war against the adversary visit pro and con about democracy at war and it's sort of discussed at length in two cities history especially the Sicilian campaign that's one place Polybius talks about in association with roman in times of peace because of the success of the rule of law and usually there's a better economy than democracy than anonymity month life is pretty good and because people run their own government they have a tendency to a vote themselves entitlements and be tried to avoid risk than any one person and that can be fatal as we saw in France in 1940 or we saw in Athens and 340 BC when they were threatened by Philip that being said if a democracy wakes up and is attacked and mobilizes all of its resources and has a majority vote there's no ultimate appeal no second-guessing you don't say Franco made us do this it wasn't me it was Hitler it's Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait no the democracy that people themselves have a stake in it and they're constantly auditing the conduct of the war and the ultimate the ultimat check on that is their own sense of fairness so if you attack a democracy and you kill a lot of people in a democracy human nature being what it is they're gonna vote to take reprisals in democracies when they're aroused make war like no other type of government I get the sense that from your writings after 9/11 that the other thing that resulted from the the Battle of that day when we were attacked was that we had to rethink or be reminded of what it is we stand for I think what has happened to us since Vietnam is that because of our success whether it's civil rights or the environment or equality of the sexes that we have created even increased appetites for greater success if we once wanted to ensure an equality of opportunity with freedom and liberty being the objects for everybody now we wanted is almost an equality of results Galit Arianism and equality were more important and that is hard to do human nature again to use that hackneyed traits to telling us that we're not all born into this world equally and to by coercion make us equal and once you have that mentality and you have a vibrant economy and you have a leisured society then you can lose touch with reality very quickly and we had this hyper criticism that if we're not utopian we're not perfect then we're other failures so immediately after 9/11 there were people whose voices we heard while was in Afghanistan part of the British Empire and it was either cultural pessimism the peaks are too high the Northern Alliance is unreliable we were not we didn't have our hands clean the British never won the Russians never won so it was either pessimism in the thought or it was sort of hyper criticism of well didn't we withdraw after we got the Soviets out and didn't somebody give aid to Osama bin Laden without any knowledge that that's the stuff of history that nobody in 1944 would say well wait a minute we gave three hundred seventy five thousand GMC trucks to Stalin we gave him probably 30,000 p39 Airacobra x' and this was a man who butchered 30 million his own people and we used him cynically to fight the Nazis no they didn't think like that they said for now at this time in this place Hitler is worse when Hitler is gone we'll turn our attention to Stalin but we're not going to judge our self tainted our fouled because we're helping people who are mass murderers to kill a greater mass murder and and that's it's it's important that Americans get out of their cocoon and wake up and realize that they don't have the ability to demand or achieve perfection not in this world and you really believe that we do control a clash of civilizations I do what I am absolutely astounded by is the clear-cut clash of the civilization we're talking about a group a minority group or perhaps 1 to 3 million people are the larger Middle East who are Islamic fundamentalists and all the Western tradition and liberalism they hate take your pick homosexuals kill them women no rights polygamy clitter ectomy consensual government no tolerance for jews and christians no hindus no buddhists no hatred patriarchy absolutely and how are they successful because whether it was colonialism or anti-communism or realpolitik are just endemic tribalism the Middle East is not with it and so when it can't feed its people it can't house them it can't educate them and it won't make these reforms they turn their animus or frustration and their state controlled media to America and the Jews and the conduit from the frustration to the media is often these Islamists and the only way to rectify that is to defeat them and to humiliate them and to offer the people who follow them an alternative and get away from supporting the road Saudi royal family or the Kuwaiti royal family and try to do something that would lead to integration within a larger world community as we have done in Latin America in Asia now now do you think that that the United States with the erosion of values that had occurred you know in the last couple of days decades is is is it able to muster the wherewithal to in engage in this conflict and sissie succeed I mean I know we have the military resources and we have a very talented and trained military that can win the military victory the the question is can we can we stay for the long war you know in in in the context of what we've become at home because of affluence and and all other sources I think we can but to be frank with you if it's a question of New York and Washington DC and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle winning this war I don't think we can there are people who get up in the morning and they go wake tables or they drive a tractor or they go pick up a criminal and they live in a real world and they understand that there's a thin line between civilization and barbarism and they've seen Saddam Hussein and they've seen Osama bin Laden in their own world and they have no compunction about eliminating him and they're just driving up today to talk to you I NPR had a man was just killed 41 years old Army Major left his six year old son he was a surgeon he just emailed his parents that he would on this time off from battle surgery he was doing free appendectomy 'he's who for Iraqis and they blew him up and killed him murdered him they knew that he was there not to take their oil they knew he was there to try to institute a liberal regime and listen to his parents did they want to sue the government no from rural Wisconsin no did they blame the military no what did they say they said the world lost a wonderful person the United States lost a great Patriot he had no regrets he knew what he was doing it's a tragedy and that is sort of what America was all about I think but you wouldn't hear that and in many places so we're in a war of the hearts and minds for America we'll see how many Americans are confident and proud of what the United States is and how many are ashamed of it and I think it's the source of evil in the world today and if those the latter group is larger and will lose and like every other society that serve eroded and addicted away and what is the challenge of leadership I that is American leadership in in the context of this dilemma you can see with the president the president is very very good mind save our Killa kisses metaphor that Fox and the Hedgehog Bill Clinton could think of a thousand things and express himself wonderly and not come to a decision Bush is not yeah he's not sophisticated he sees right and wrong and that's what you needed more the only problem that I have is that he needs to remind America this is not about weapons of mass destruction this is not about the world's oil supply this is not just about 9/11 this is a war with a type of enemy who if its agenda was realized would end all the things that we think are dear and he needs to remind the American people that the Japanese like to import oil so that the world can have Honda's or Toyota Prius is trying to deal so with the environment the Europeans like to trade and sell farm equipment to the Middle East there's a sophisticated world people like to go study at Harvard from Jordan that whole system is based on certain trust certain protections but these people these terrorists and Islamists would destroy as we see in Spain as we see in Turkey as we see in Morocco this is the force the face of barbarism and they'll either win or lose and it's so how obviously part of the problem here is to win a military victory but beyond that how do you win the battle of ideas what I think we should give ourselves some credit we realize it's not can't be won with ideas and it can't be won with force it has to be won with both so militarily we're going to defeat autocratic fistic governments either now in the past that have sponsored aided abetted terrorists at the same time we're offering them the carrot and saying this is a you new United States look at Panama look at Milosevic look at Taliban we're not just say pump or keep out the Russians Shaw Iran Saudi royal family we're doing something differently and we're trying to spend blood and treasure to give you an alternative to bin Laden and if you don't want it you don't have to but we're going to get rid of bin Laden and we're gonna get rid of what is it stands for and that's all we can do we did with the German people we did it with Japanese we did it with less success in Korea we did it with no success in Vietnam but we're gonna try to do it and we'll give them the alternative looking down the road how would you advise students to prepare for the future for this this world that you're describing in which some of what the Greeks taught us really helps us understand that world and and virtues like a character and and courage and so on matter how should I prepare for that way I think they should realize that the skills that make one successful in 500 BC may be the same today it's not just adapting to a new technology or new lifestyle it's realizing that a new lifestyle or a new technology or a new computer is simply a manifestation of the human experience but if you know language you know history you know argumentation you can write well then you can function in any new environment that's the only that's the only constant that can prepare you and the same thing if you come to class on time if you turn a paper in time if you don't plagiarize if you play by a particular convention or rule or law then whatever the change a situation puts you in China puts you in Hong Kong the same principles of success and well-being will apply what I'm worried about is what I call the sirens of present ISM because you have 500 channels or you have a new desktop and you've kind of faked yourself into believing that you don't have to write anymore computers will do it or there's a situational ethics that is a new morality or there's a moral equivalence and you really see it in Afghanistan we're deliberately trying to blow somebody up in New York in a time of peace is the same as somebody dying when you're deliberately trying to avoid killing civilians and killing the people who kill people in Afghanistan so we've got to watch that this more utopian pacifism moral equivalence multiculturalism no appreciation for the uniqueness of your culture and broad general education that's what I would advise students on that note picture I want to thank you for coming to the campus to lecture today and to be with us today and in sharing with us this very fascinating intellectual journey thank you thank you for having me and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history
