Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson has been relatively quiet lately even as Iraq imploded. There’s a reason for this. He took a bad spill on his bicycle last month and then was in Europe for a couple weeks. When he returned home, he had to deal with surgery (or surgeries). In two recent posts at National Review he has made up for some lost time. Here are are few excerpts from both posts — in the first one the sarcasm is thick:
Lots of Recent Man-Caused Distasters
Even the administration is now considering some sort of overseas contingency operation to cope with an outbreatk of workplace violence worldwide.
Hanson mentions the killing and kidnapping by Boko Haram, the kidnapping of Israeli teens by Hamas, what’s happening in Iraq, the story of the mother facing death for rejecting Islam, and a couple of other events. Then he writes:
Apparently, none of these Islamic terrorists heard that the Obama administration very much wished to shut down Guantanamo or had blamed a video maker for the violence in Libya, or extolled Islam in the Cairo speech, or had taken every soldier out of Iraq as a token of our good will, or will be gone from Afghanistan by 2016, or had devoted NASA inter alia to Islamic outreach, or banned the words “Islamic” and “radical Islam” in association with terrorism, a word itself that is likewise excised.
Hanson writes that “It is difficult to identify a common pathology in these examples when the requisite vocabulary has been declared politically unacceptable.” Read the entire post here.
Here’s the title and subtitle of the second post:
America’s Middle East Dilemma
Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.
Just one excerpt:
There is a common theme to the repeated messes in the Middle East. Invading countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq to topple genocidal anti-American tyrants doesn’t result in long-term advantages unless there are years of American postwar occupation — which is costly and deeply unpopular with voters.
Letting Middle East factions kill each other off — and kill tens of thousands of innocents in their way — poses a humanitarian disaster and can lead to the sort of chaotic badlands that allowed Osama bin Laden and his gangsters to plan attacks on the U.S.
Just bombing and leaving is not always that much better. A chaotic Libya is now worse than under Qaddafi.
Whichever bad choice the Obama administration prefers, it should at least level with the American people.
Read the entire article at National Review.
