| | "Any time a country goes to war there's going to be things done that one would not want to be done, but the alternative is paralysis. We did things, whether it was bombing Tokyo or bombing Dresden, that were pretty horrific, but they were done to stop things like the Holocaust and to stop things like the destruction of millions in China or the Philippines or Korea. In the case of Iraq, whatever we've done in Iraq it will turn out to be in 20 years a fraction of the number that Saddam Hussein killed of his own people and the number he would have killed. We really don't have that option in war to just say there's a good alternative and there's a bad alternative. Once Saddam Hussein was in power, and once he had petrol-fed dollars, and once he had a history of getting weapons, and once he had a tendency to use them, then there was going to be X amount of people killed either way -- either allowing him to go on or to stop him. That's what we have to concentrate on."
(In response to a question about the American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war.)
From an interesting 3-hour interview.
His point is that you can't sit back in fear of potential consequences and be paralyzed. We did nothing after the takeover of the US embassy in Iran, nothing after the murder of the marines in Lebanon, nothing after the first Trade Center attack, nother after the USS Cole, and it just emboldened them and detroyed any deterrence that we had from our military power. Post Iraq, we have Libya cooperating, information coming out of Pakistan on their WMD's, information and pressure on Iran...
He also says that every tactical victory for the terrorists (apart from possibly Spain) has turned out to be a strategic defeat. They bombed the World Trade center hoping to get America out of, and to stop the westernization of, the Middle East, and now we're occupying Iraq and installing a democracy with women's rights, etc. They hoped we would get involved in a quagmire in Afghanistan, and we swept them out easily and have them on the run. They hoped to create divisiveness in Turkey, and they unified Turks against terrorism.
He had a lot of interesting things to say on a wide range of issues. Too bad the C-Span format is so bad. Random call-ins are no substitute fro a skilled interviewer or even just a podium and a time slot.
Professor Hanson is a classicist, war historian, and political essayist. I've read one of his 16 books, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, which was quite good.
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