Victor Davis Hanson is the resident war hawk at the Hoover Insitute at Stanford. He has a regular column in which he regales us with the glories of righteour battle. Last week he compared attitudes of Americans to deaths in WW II to deaths in Iraq — to the detriment of us modern sissies. Here is a good take on VDH from Main and Central, a military oriented anti-war site.

“I admire some of Hanson’s earlier books. I read The Soul of Battle in a class once and thought his description and defense of Sherman was brilliant. In the past few years, though, I have watched him sliding into blather; he has become a self-contradicting waterboy for a crowd of hawks who, well, might not have fucked up so much if they’d actually read some of his earlier works. (Or Barbara Tuchman’s. Or Liddell Hart’s. Unfortunately, the only strategy that concerns them is political. Thucydides may be a stranger to them, but Machiavelli they turn to as to an old friend.)”

Main and Central: The Soul of Victor Davis Hanson

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