Beyond Iraq

Victor is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Victor received his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University in 1980. After finishing his degree he had a commitment to family in which he went back and farmed full time for four years on his family's tree and wine farm near Selma, California. In 1984 he returned to academia but in a constrained way, to initiate initiate a classics department at California State University at Fresno, Cal State Fresno. It enabled him to continue his farming applications and at the same time re-energize and re-dedicate to the academic tradition. He was a professor of classics there until June of 2004 so some 10 years, at which time he took "early retirement, enjoying the Hoover institution full time". Victor of author or editor of 16 books many of which have won awards, notable among them are Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in Rise of Western Power which was New York Times best seller and his most recent book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, which the New York Times named as one of the 100 significant books of 2005, amazing the Peloponnesian War, he is also a weekly columnist for National Review Online, writes a syndicated column in many newspapers around the country. The thing about Victor is that as a classicist and military historian Victor has an amazing ability to bring his scholarly work to bear on important contemporary issues of war, diplomacy and national security. This has led to his being called on frequently to advice top leaders in Washington including the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. These are troubling times and Victor has an amazing sort of aptitude and perspective on these important issues. So his topic this morning is titled beyond Iraq and I welcome your applause please for Victor Davis Hanson. Thank you very much, we are entering our fourth finishing our fourth war year of war in Iraq and it is a troubling time. As you know last week Senator Harry Reid declared war lost, I found that interesting and troubling because if you go back in October of 2002, especially on the 11th of October and read these statements in the US Senate supporting the authorization to go to war is most unique, now there was a majority of democratic senators who had voted to go to war but of all the senators, Senator Reid made the argument not on WMD but on the 22 other reasons that he had voted along with his constituents his colleagues to go to war, especially he said we have always been in the state of war with Saddam because he never respected the 91' peace accords, and so we are just finishing what has been going on for 12 years in the no fly zone, it was remarkable speech as was his complete turnaround this week. Also we have had of a state publications, I think all of you in the audience have read at some time the last year or two, Bob Woodward's State of Denial, Tom Ricks Fiasco, General Trainer, and Michael Gordon's Cobra II we have had a series of articles written by Pulitzer prize man Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post and they all have a consensus on why we have basically have lost this war in Iraq and if I could just some up their points we did not deploy enough troops, we did not build large enough coalition, we did not get enough financial contributions from allies, we were naïve and expecting that people as inept as the Shia could ever accept Parliamentary Democracy. We underestimated the baleful influence of Iran and on and on. Now what's interesting about all of these authors, they are all on record of writing books with titled not Khobar II but the Generals War. Rick Atkinson wrote a book called Crusade, they all weighed in on the First Gulf War, 1991. And if I could I be fair enough to co-relate their criticisms which they didn't like that war either and this is what they said collectively in their various books. That we can't trust the Pentagon, they always exaggerate the danger and they sent too many troops over. We grossly stripped down allies to make war a money making enterprise. We crafted an unwieldy alliance that dictated the mission and hampered our ability to act after the war. We were completely cynical and realistic and did not promote the democratic aspirations of the Kurds and Shia. And we perversely overestimated the influence of Iran that really had nothing to do with the Shia in Iraq. It's just exactly the opposite, what's the constant I would be cynical but I still think it has something to do with whatever the Bush administration one or two was for, they were against. And then as another sign of the times we have this idea that perhaps with displeasure over the daily narrative of depression that comes out of Iraq or maybe it's our complacence that nothing has really happened in a serious fashion since 9/11 here in the United States there is a new new strain of thinking that we are really not any war against terror anymore and I mean that literally. Two weeks ago, the British government outlawed the use of the phrase, War on Terror and they said it was counter productive, irrelevant and unnecessarily incendiary to the feelings of Muslims. Today, the US Military outlawed the word, I say, out law that's dramatic. But just put aside the word "Long War." They felt that the long war was a mannequin idea that we were in some type of Samuel Huntington class of civilizations when we really weren't. I don't know if you saw the up ed in the Washington Post two weeks ago by the former National Security Advisor of the Jimmy Carter's, Mr. Brzezinski but he said that the real danger is not the war on is not the terrorists but the war against the terrorists. That we have manufactured a nonexistent trend into a real war that's depriving ourselves, us of our civil liberty's and alienating us across the globe. You should also remember that Francis Fukuyama's in 1998, wrote a letter along with a group of other neoconservatives advocating a preemptive war on Saddam Hussein. Just recently wrote another piece now five years well, six years later saying that after neo-conservatism when he said, we're really not in a war. John Carrey was right, it was a nuisance and the war the word war is the wrong metaphor. And so, when we've seen coalescing after the bad news from Iraq is that we really don't have anything to worry about. And the war is essentially over and those who believe it is not have certain sorts certain agendas that they want to pursue at our expense. That's very wrong and deadly wrong for a number of reasons. Number one is that since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has cataloged 10 serious incidents that was that were broken up before they could come to fruition. Those were planned attacks in the United States against bridges, malls - shopping malls, and other strategic targets like airliners. Just last week, British intelligence intercepted an Al Qaeda transcript where they said they were aiming at a large scale terrorist attack, that would have the the affect the effect somewhat similar to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That's probably exaggerated, but that's what the intelligence service intercepted. We should also, and so the idea is that, if we are alarmist and that alarmism has presented another attack that's no reason not to be alarmist. It would be as if we were to say that because traffic, deaths per miles driven have radically dropped, radically dropped with the advance of seat belts and air bags and improved roads and body construction in cars. So therefore we don't need to do that anymore. I will remind everybody that since automobiles hit the roads in United States, we have lost about seven times more people in auto-accidents than we have in war. 3.2 million Americans have been killed since 1910 on our highways. It's a staggering statistics. There is something else to remember why that's a wrong idea that we're not really in a war any longer, that is that 9/11 was unique. It was really unique, remember that the Weimar which often this criticism says these are not conventional worries like the Weimar to the Japanese in World War II with the Soviet. That Weimar was never able to destroy 20 acres in Downtown Manhattan. Japanese militaries were never able to hit the Pentagon. For all of this 60-years of the cold war the Soviets were never able to inflict a half a trillion dollars on the US economy in a single day. 9/11 was something unique and I think most of us recognized that while we could withstand one of them, we could not withstand them in serial fashion. That they would so undermine the fabric of western civilization that life as we know could not go on. Now some say well they really haven't changed our way of life. Its not just that every one of you who flew here had to change radically his behavior or her behavior since 9/11 and I mean that from the inconvenience of security to been making your shoes come off, your belt come off humiliating searches in some cases, you can't even bring tooth past or shampoo on your carry ons but to the fundamentals of western life I don't think any body ten years ago would say that you couldn't write a novel again about Islam or you would share the fate of Salman Rushdie. I didn't think anybody in post modern Europe would ever dream that a cartoonist couldn't freely express themselves. I don't think anybody would ever believe that a German opera company would voluntarily sensor their own production. I don't think anybody in the Netherlands would think that a film maker would have his throat cut for making a documentary film. I don't think anybody believe that a Pope will have to be very careful with a statement he made about the history twelve hundred years ago might result in the deaths of people abroad. I don't think anybody in Newsweek dreamed that a single mistake in their funny little irreverent periscope column about a flushed Koran could lead to 16 deaths in rioting. So what I am suggesting is that before we down play this struggle is not a war the jihadist already had achieved a curtailment of the western enlightenment that was a product of 600 years of struggle and sacrifice. There is another thing to remember, many the critics of the idea that we're at war say well these people are not stateless. They are not conventional enemies. They don't bring to the struggle or the resources of the state. In some ways that's true but in some ways that too is irrelevant because they have advantages. They some cases the Jihadist bring to the struggle the resources of the state but with one key proviso. They have established a deniability of culpability. That's our greatest disadvantage and their greatest advantage and what I mean by that is, as we speak Taliban and Jihadist have sanctuary in Pakistan. We cannot touch them because Pakistan and there is one border, what from a dictatorship to an Islamic republic and it's nuclear and they have essentially seeded over Waziristan to Islamic radicals in complete with complete impunity. We can't really do anything to Saudi Arabia. We know that members of the 7000 size royal family give money to Jihadist and that money kills Americans in Iraq and that money was responsible for 9/11 and we can't do anything because they deny it and they have as you know control over the petroleum reserves. We know we know that Syria and Iran give money but they deny that they do, they give sanctuary and so that gives these stateless terrorists advantages that the nation states, in some cases, never had. We also live in a globalized world. The fundamental tenet of American defense policy until the last 20 years is we were a two ocean nation. With two friendly countries on either side of our border and we were somewhat immune from conventional attack. I know during the cold war we had to fear missiles but even that was mitigated by the fact that we could base the anti missile devices in Canada, it was longer for them shoot, but with advent of miniaturized globalized - miniaturized weapons globalized communications, our open borders create a vulnerability and our two oceans are irrelevant. Now when you can destroy a water system by disrupting its computerized blue print thorough the Internet or you can wipe out the 401K plans of thousands. That's a new idea in warfare and it's really turned over topsy-turvy idea of what constitutes military power. I don't really care that the jihadists do not have anything comparable to an Abrams tank or an F16 they don't. But in this new type of war, that's may not be necessary. A vile of gas, a vile of germs a dirty bomb strapped with somebody who went into the stock exchange and blew it up would cause at least enough psychological trauma to trump anything that Hitler might envision. Then there is one aspect that we are all aware of and that's oil. Before September 11 the price was below $20 now it's hovering around 70. That increase in price giving the exporting capacity of the Middle East represents a net windfall, in addition to profits, a net windfall of $500 billion per year. And those economies autocratic have not earned that well. They have not made the steady economic political, social and cultural reforms that we see in places like South Korea, or Taiwan or South America or China. It's been a windfall and they are utterly incapable of using that capital for productive purposes. And so that petro-dollars circulate. Without them Ahmadinejad of Iran is just another two bit thug of the class of Robert Mugabe. Somebody we deployed but we don't have to worry about. Without them Hezbollah is something like analogous to the shining path. But with petro dollars and state sanctuaries, these - we have super sized a local regional menace into a global threat to our very livelihood. All of these things will continue after Iraq. Whether we like to say that we are done with the war, whether we think that it was never really a war these things are not going to go go away. They can be made worse or they can be made better in the manner in which we get out of Iraq. But they are not going to go away. And finally there is a question of Iran. Iran will not go away after Iraq. We have this feeling that somehow we antagonized Iran, that the Bush administration's provocative stance isolated it. That perhaps Nancy Pelosi and others would like to enter a dialogue. This is a country that we tried to have a dialogue with for 20 years and we make one great mistake in thinking about Iran. I don't advocate bombing. I hope the EU3, even though they have failed, they can come back and talk to Iran. I hope the non-proliferation agencies of the world community United Nations can talk sense in them. I hope that Iraq can be stabilized and can be infectious to them as they are to us. I hope that Afghanistan would will as a democracy and also detour them. We hope that the dissidence in Iran you know, Iran themselves may at some point seize power. Nobody wants to use preemptory military force, we know what it would entail. But nevertheless it's not going to go away because of one simple reason. A nuclear device bomb for Iran is a winwin situation. They have every thing to gain and nothing to lose so far by trying to acquire it. Once they get a bomb they, like Pakistan, have deterrence against anybody who questions their use of sanctuary or money for terrorism. They can dictate to the Gulf States whom they despise, the price and capacity and amount of oil that's left on the world market and they get a national sense of Persian, prestige, nationhood that can quell domestic dissent. So why in the world would they want to give that up when it's plus, plus, plus and there is no negatives involved. We have to start with that assumption. That too will not change after or beyond Iraq. And finally what was driving Islamic radicalism? Why did we go to war with him after 9/11? People keep trying to find a particular reason. It had to be Israel; it had to be our troops in Saudi Arabia. It had to be our provocative stance towards Saddam Hussein. It had to be something that we did with collateral damage in Afghanistan but they don't read what Bin Laden said. Doctor Zawahiri, so far, as of this month, has listed 17 reasons why he went to war with United States. Seventeen reasons. Coarser things like the UN blockade in the 1990s, which was over, the oil for food which was over, the troops in Saudi Arabia which were over. But as soon as they are over new ones sprout, my favorite two are the lack of campaign finance reform the United States and the American ability to sign the Kyoto Accords, both of them listed by Dr. Zawahiri. They changed the mutate and they always will because they are not the reason. They are just the perceived grievances. The real reason is that with the onset of global communication, CDs, cell phones, the internet for the first time in the last quarter century people in the Middle East understood how miserable life was vis-à-vis, South America, what was happening in Asia, even parts of Africa and of course Europe and United States. And under autocratic governments there was no method of expression of reform and especially not cultural reform which would be necessary to make the necessary adjustments to catch-up. And we know those would entail not just the end of statism, not just transparency and independent judiciary, a protection of property rights, but fundamental things like religious tolerance and ended gender apartheid and ended polygamy and ended female circumcision, all of those things which were taboo subjects. And out of that, frustration that (indiscernible) frustration where failure was now in their living rooms and they was no able - there is no mechanism to express that. We have this unholy alliance where autocratic governments allow terrorists to direct popular popular discontent against United States and Israel. And that explains why contrary to what - everybody says it were not or well that explains why the United States whether they give billions of dollars in relief to Tsunami victims, many of them whom were Muslims, whether save Kuwait, whether they give a billion dollars a year to Jordan, $60 billion in aggregate to Egypt, they give billions of dollars they had so far to the Palestinian authority. They bombed a Christian European country to save Muslims, they tried to feed Somalis, they were the only Western Nation to object to the Russian's treatment of Chechens, whatever we they have done, it's not going to do the trick because it's not why people are angry. These are existential, elemental reasons and that's why the original idea that we were in a long war and in the war, we are justified. Let me just finish buy suggesting what can we do. The first thing is recognize those reasons, second is to continue to try to kill the terrorist abroad, one of the anomalies of this war and I can't think of a war in our our history or any other war where we concentrate only on our losses and defeat and our malaise and our discontent but never what the enemy must be thinking, or never how many people have been killed going to Iraq and Afghanistan who may have gone else where to cause mayhem in Europe and United States. So we have to continue that military arm, we are waging a war of ideas and its remarkable how many times if you read the Fatwas and infomercials that emanate out of Dr. Zawahiri and he is the Mr. Gerbils of the new Al Qaeda Movement. How many of them are recycled from criticism of the West by the West. We need to continue that war of ideas and remind not just people in the Middle East, they know the reason really. But its people in the West that are far more worrisome, that no matter what we have done, we have a good record with the Muslim world and these grievances that they adduce daily and serially are perceived rather than legitimate and then and this is probably the most controversial. Third we need to continue to promote consensual government that does not mean as Francis Fukuyama's caricature that we are going on some type of evangelical crusade to bring constitutional government, that people are incapable of it. We have not done that in Libya. We have not done that in Egypt, we have not invaded Syria. We have not tried to do that with Saudi Arabia. We did it with the two worst countries. Why, because one, was directly responsible 9/11 and the other had a serial history of antagonism and war with the United States and was harping terrorists of various sorts. And those are the only two countries today where a great number of Muslims get up every morning and they participate in a constitutional process and they go out and kill radical terrorists. They do not do that in Saudi Arabia, they do not do that in Syria, they do not do that in Iran and that ultimately will offer some choice between this failed binary selection, of either theocracy or dictatorship and finally we need to get rid of our dependence on oil. I don't mean that we need to be petroleum independent, we don't have to we are not even going to be food independent next year. We are going to import more food than we consume. What I mean, as we need to take two to three to four million barrels of appetite off the world market so that we don't come in consuming 25 percent of the world's petroleum and therefore drive that price up to $70 a barrel. We can all agree or disagree on how we get there to cut four or five million barrels, 10% of our consumption, whether it's Ethanol, whether it's lifting the tariffs on Brazilian ethanol, whether it's getting on the grid with nuclear power so that we have hybrid electric cars for commuters, whether we up the conservation averages of our truck and automobile fleet, whether we drill it oil or we can do all of that, cold gasification but the key is to get three to four million barrels of consumption down, so the price falls before below $20. When the price falls below $20 then as I said Mr. Ahmadinejad is just another Mugabe thug and when somebody straps on a suicide bomb and does something, that's not going to get more attention in the world scene than the 250000 who are butchered in Darfur or the one million who are killed in Rwanda and we will get away from this idea that as we speak today the (indiscernible) Islands are occupied. Cyprus is occupied. Tibet is occupied. 10 percent of Germany was lost and in some cases occupied but the world is not paralyzed and fixated on that, they are fixated on the West Bank because the patrons of the West Bank commit terrorism and they have access to patrons who have oil. So that's a large menu but we are in a war and we are in a war against Islamic fundamentalists and anybody who suggests that we are not I am afraid is naive at best and defeatist at worst. Thank you very much. I will be happy to take questions.