Victor Davis Hanson v. Ronald Edsforth

By Nathaniel Ward | Friday, February 11, 2005

During a debate Tuesday punctuated with evidence from both antiquity and current events, classicist Victor Davis Hanson mounted a vigorous defense of the war in Iraq, while Dartmouth History Professor Ronald Edsforth countered that all preemptive wars, especially in the case of Iraq, fall outside the "just war tradition."

Focusing on Iraq as the best contemporary example of a war fought for noble ends, Hanson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, suggested that the war's rationale remains valid today. The Bush Administration and the Congress, he said, had in 2002 an "everything and the kitchen sink" rationale for conflict, but sought for political reasons to give more weight to Iraq's apparent weapons of mass destruction than other rationales. While W.M.D.s have yet to be found, Hanson argued that the weapons "still remain a valid reason then and now."

Wars like that in Iraq have moral goals, he continued. The nations of the Middle East, for various reasons, including Cold War oil politics, have never been exposed to Enlightenment ideas of equality and liberty, and he said they even view Western faith in such ideals a weakness. Accordingly, he said, it is only right that the West stop propping up authoritarian leaders in the region, as it did during the Cold War, and to do what should have been done there long ago: foster freedom.

Hanson further posited that preemptive war, so reviled by many today as immoral, is certainly not unknown in history; a preemptive conflict is judged to be just or unjust based on its context and its success. He cited the historical prevalence of preemptive wars: the Athenian expeditions against Sparta; the American attack on the Barbary pirates; and the American invasion of Mexico. Even in recent memory, the United States has engaged in preemptive warfare, by attacking Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Few of these wars, if any, are today considered unjust, despite their preemptive nature, he said.

Taking a rigorous stand against preemptive war, Professor Edsforth said democracy is not something that can be forced onto a population—"it comes from within and it is unlikely to be imposed from without." Instead, democracies can only form as they did recently in Ukraine, based on a popular uprising against the authoritarian leadership. Edsforth sought to apply this rule to Iraq, saying that Western powers should have simply awaited Saddam Hussein's death and then fomented revolution; this, he said, would be far less costly in blood and treasure. As a result of the coalition's 2003 invasion, he said Iraq "is in no condition to function normally for years to come."

Professor Edsforth presented himself as a "peace activist" and not a pacifist—pacifists abhor all wars, while activists oppose some and support others. He approved of the 2001 Afghan campaign but not the attack on Serbia in 1999. He said "all war is mass murder" and that wars bring out man's "instinct to kill, our delight in torture."

By invading Iraq, he went on, the United States has abandoned its own democratic ideology and gone "down the slippery slope to militarism" and become "willing to delegate to our commander in chief the powers of a king." As evidence, he said that the War on Terror has morphed into a broader War on Tyranny—a conflict not likely to end during his own lifetime. He proposed that the United States military was too large; he noted in particular that the United States maintains ten aircraft carrier battle groups, and is in fact the only nation to have even one. "The wars of empire are over," he said.

Edsforth further supported "classical deterrence," though Hanson claimed this would be impossible with the greatly-reduced army Edsforth suggested. "You cannot have classical deterrence without a military," he said.

By attacking Iraq, Edsforth said, the United States had usurped the authority of the United Nations, in which the world community can take action to promote the common good. Since treaties like those that established the U.N. are held in the United States to be "the supreme law of the land," he said, the American government has effectively abrogated its own Constitution. He noted, for example, that a White House lawyer drafted guidelines regarding torture, even though the U.S. is party to the Geneva Conventions.

"War is terrible," Hanson agreed. But in a rebuttal, he said the United Nations has historically not intervened for the common good, even against the worst abuses. The U.N., much of which he said is "populated by thugs and brigands" like Syria, Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, failed to act against the Rwandan genocide of 1994, against the Serbian slaughter of Kosovars in 1998, or even against the ongoing genocide in Darfur—which only the United States has declared a humanitarian crisis. "Innocent women and children died waiting" for the United Nations to help them, he said.

In addition, Hanson said the wars of the twentieth century were "done with the intention of saving lives." "War alone" was often the only option. More people were killed off the battlefield in the last hundred years—by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—than perished in the wars fought to stop those dictators. These wars, he continued, were by no means multilateral; indeed, the only multilateral action undertaken in 1941 was the decision by European powers from Spain to Hungary to Germany to invade the Soviet Union.

America today should not shirk from stopping such brutal dictators, Hanson concluded. Apparently high casualties in Iraq, he continued, are extremely small compared to the deaths from single days of combat in the Pacific theater during World War Two. Even civilian casualty figures should be taken with a grain of salt, he said: civilians killed in Iraq or elsewhere "are not necessarily innocent" since "a lot of these people were cold-blooded killers and have been for twenty years."

The conversation soon shifted to broader ideology.

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war, especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. "Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact," he said. "It didn't stop back in ancient times... We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely." Indeed, he suggested that American foreign policy has over the past several decades been a reactionary effort to "turn back the clock" to the systems of the past. "We should lead the world in creating this new environment," he said, "and not stand as a roadblock before its creation."

As evidence, he explained that in 2003 the only international wars were the two American wars—in Afghanistan and in Iraq. He proposed that the United States adopt a foreign policy for "the twenty-first century, not the fifth century B.C., not the nineteenth century, not 1941." The world sees "war as a legacy of the imperialist era," he added.

Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed significantly in the past several thousand years. "Human nature is set," he said—it was "primordial, reptilian," adding that man is always "governed by pride and fear and envy." He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is unchanging. "We have not reached the end of history."

Whether human opinion changes is irrelevant to the question of human nature, Hanson said; he thought many Americans suffer from an "ethnocentric bias" that makes Le Monde and Der Spiegel "the arbiters of world opinion."

At a question-and-answer session at the end of the debate, this view of human nature was the subject of much disdain by many members of the audience. One fellow questioned whether "you and Homer and Thucydides two-thousand years ago" were cut out for modernity. Another asked Hanson when the war in Iraq would come to end—"when will we reap the benefits of preemptive war?"—and wondered whether "Pericles would have any advice for defeating suicide bombers in an urban environment." Actually, Hanson retorted, the juxtaposition was poorly-chosen, as Peloponnesian War lasted for "twenty-seven and a half years."

During one of the lighter moments, Hanson jokingly observed that the Iraq war had made some unlikely allies. "I never thought in my lifetime that Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan would have an alliance of convenience," he said, smiling.

Victor Davis Hanson v. Ronald Edsforth

Article Tools

Related Articles