Uncommon Knowledge: Victor Davis Hanson

The word is nucLear not nucUlar. It's a small thing but he said it so many times.

No mention of Bush invading Iraq out of revenge for his father?

I don't buy your "tu quoque" ("you also") argument. The only way to avoid doing the things you term atrocities is to completely withdraw from the world. If we don't support our allies in war and sell them armaments, their enemies and our enemies will win. If we don't compete for natural resources, we will lose our way of life and our world leadership. (I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide if our international business deals are "rip offs".) As for chaos and conflict, unless you mean the U.S. goes into smooth running countries and turns the tables over, which I don't think you mean, the U.S. doesn't create conflict or chaos. If these countries have any history, it's likely that the conflict and chaos started long before. I hope you're not comparing China's occupation of Tibet and the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan to our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. may not have clean hands, but we are FAR more benign than any previous world power and WAY better than any future alternative. Can you honestly say you think the world would be a better place if China or Russia or France or (god help us) the U.N. ran the show? Being world police isn't a job we asked for. It's probably not a job we're qualified for, but we're stuck with it. The day the U.S. lays down its leadership will be the darkest day in world history.

Victor needs to look into the mirror and see a US imperialism that is perpetrating the same sort of atrocities on the rest of the world: supporting sides in war, selling implements of war, overtaking smaller empires to rip off natural resources, creating conflict and chaos to benefit the wealthy power brokers. Same thing. Don't be so righteous. Look in your own back yard, Victor and turn your judgment on your own country. That may help bring some light to the problem.

I guess FORA has to be diverse and allow all political POVs. But I get so sick and tired of this Islamophobic BS that puts the so-called "clash of civilizations" on a racial basis- i.e.: Muslims as aliens that will somehow outbreed the "white" population like a foreign species crowding native ones. Any non-hysterical study of the stats will show that Muslims will not reach anywhere near the numbers he's spouting in under 50 years. And most of Russia's Muslims are just as "white" as "native" Russians, and have their own beefs with Mother Russia going back to when Stalin slaughtered and deported them by the millions. And please, congratulate Putin on Chechniya (another one of Stalin's chickens coming home to roost)??? Congratulate him on mass arrest & murder of civilians? If anything this will make their "muslim problem" worse- for themselves, and possibly the rest of the West. A far more intelligent analysis of Russia is from political analyst George Friedman (founder of STRATFOR)in his book, THE NEXT 100 YEARS. Russia has always been (and always will be, unless the Arctic thaws for good) a collection of landlocked economically handicapped countries, with no easily defensible borders. From the time of the czars, Russia's glue was brute force. Russia shrunk once with the collpase of the USSR; it's inevitable that someone will fill the power vacuum- NATO, Turkey, China, etc. If it shrinks again, Russia may be back to its' boundaries from the Middle Ages, surrounded by nations that are more propsperous, more populous, and better armed. This is an existential crisis Russia is dealing with. It may be a sop to the neocon ego to paint Putin as the fool in a Greek tragedy, but don't expect him to throw himself at our feet anytime soon. Any alliance with the US will be seen as an excuse to expand American power at Russia's expense (which it probably will be), and will likely enable Russia's bad behavior (i.e.: Chechniya). Russia has to accept the fact that it's no longer an empire, and work from there. Can it deal with the changes? I just saw a documentary about the rise of neo-Nazi groups among Russians, crusading against non-Russian "foreigners". It doesn't look good...

I liked the most things he said. I doubt only about the way of solving the radical islam problem because it may do it even more radical.