Farmer-Professor Makes the Case for Making War

It was the Sunday before Christmas, and the Mexican restaurant on the main street of this little San Joaquin Valley farm town was jammed with families gathered for holiday brunch. Squeals of children and the banter of adults bounced off the walls, creating a strangely joyous background for a conversation about war.

I had come to lunch with Victor Davis Hanson, one of the valley’s most interesting natives. A farmer, Hanson, 49, grows raisins on 40 acres that have been in his family for five generations. A professor, he teaches Greek studies at Fresno State. Hanson also has written several books -- brooding reflections on agrarian life, spirited histories of ancient war.

And in the last year, he has emerged as one of the nation’s most visible advocates for going to war with Iraq and any other nations that sponsor or give tacit support to terrorists.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he pounded out the first of hundreds of thousands of words he eventually would publish on the topic: “Yes, we are at a great juncture in American history. We can go to battle, as we once did in the past -- hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more.”

Since then, Hanson has written regularly for the National Review Online, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. A collection of his war essays has been published in book form, “An Autumn of War.” He has done the talk shows, spoken on college campuses.

And along the way, the farmer from Selma has captured the attention of the Bush administration, grateful for support from the usually mocking vineyards of academia. In the last month, Hanson -- on loan to the Naval Academy for a year, where he has been teaching military history -- has been invited to dinner with the Cheneys, Christmas festivities with the Bushes. He is slated to address the Joint Chiefs of Staff early this year.

Heady stuff, but when I arrived at his farmhouse, he had just finished a morning-long battle with a broken sewer pipe. He washed up and we headed into town.

As we slid into our booth, I told him that I have encountered many people with doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, but few who were willing to make a case for the project.

“I think I can give you 10 reasons right now,” Hanson said at the restaurant. “I mean, besides the fact that Saddam Hussein invaded two countries, sent missiles into two others, tried to assassinate the president of the United States, butchered his own people, broke all the armistice accords that were signed in 1991, has provided a haven for terrorists.... “

His list-making was interrupted by the waitress. Hanson ordered a beef taco. I went for the machaca. And then it was back to the war.

“We wouldn’t even be talking about this,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for 9/11. What 9/11 did was establish that there are people in the Middle East who sponsor terrorists, and have capital, and are willing to send people over here to kill us in a time of peace.

“So there is no margin of error anymore.... There has been a threshold that has been crossed. They are not afraid of anything now. They need money. And they need capital. And the one regime that has been the center for that has been Saddam Hussein’s.”

In Hanson’s view, this is a war that has been going on for some time, but its battles often have been mislabeled as crimes: “I think we have been at war with ... antidemocratic, fascist, Islamic terrorists and their supporters for 20 years. But they were like a fly on a dog. We’d just sort of swat them away.

“The economy was good, American suburban life was great. Why go over there and fight these crazy people? As long as they don’t kill more than 100 of our servicemen a year, that’s OK. As long as they don’t blow up too much -- give them a bomb a year.

“Blow up the World Trade Center, but don’t kill too many people. Try to blow up the L.A. airport, but don’t carry it off. Kill a couple of CIA people in a parking lot in Virginia, fine. Blow up a barracks; they’re just Marines. Blow up an embassy; they knew what they were doing when they went into Africa.

“That was the American mind-set.”

That mind-set, he said, cleared the path to Sept. 11: “Every time they did one of these things, Americans either sent them a cruise missile or a lecture or something. They gained the impression that we just were not going to risk anything to go to war over there.

“So we lost the one thing you don’t want to lose in a war. You don’t want to lose a sense of deterrence. Americans think we have all these carriers and all this military power, so they wouldn’t do anything.

“But deterrence is never measured by what you think. It only matters what the enemy thinks.

“And one of the worst things throughout history is a power that has military superiority but is afraid to use it. Because that brings contempt.”

What must be done now, he said, is to demonstrate that the punishment for giving aid or comfort to terrorists who would attack America will be so terrible that “nobody in their right mind would want to do it.”

So how does he think it will all turn out, this business with Iraq?

“I would imagine the United States is going to go in there, and three or four weeks later it is going to be the end of Saddam Hussein and his government.” A period of instability may follow, but “eventually you will have a consensual government.” And that, Hanson said, could be a great benefit.

“I see the problem right now is that we had 30,000 troops in the Middle East before this crisis started, under a system that people said was stable. I wouldn’t see after the war being over that we would need any more than we have now. But the difference is that they would not be trying to support autocratic governments from lunatic autocratic governments. They would be trying to protect consensual governments from autocratic governments.

“And that seems to me a much better investment for America.”

Does he see any options other than war?

“I wish I did. Nobody wants war. Nobody wants a bunch of American kids getting killed. But there is a utility to war that people don’t think about. The great evils of the last two centuries -- slavery, fascism, Nazism, Japanese militarism, even Soviet totalitarianism -- either have been ended by war or the threat of war.”

Did he need to see any more proof? A direct Iraqi link to Sept. 11? Discovery of an ongoing weapons program?

“I don’t need any more evidence,” he said.

“Like I said, 3,000 Americans were killed. Where were the people from who did it? They were from the Middle East. Why did they do it? To attack American power and influence. And how did they do it? They did it with money and sanctuary.

“And which are the places that gave them money and sanctuary? We know that terrorism thrives in three places. In chaos like Afghanistan and Somalia; in dictatorships like Syria, Libya, Saddam Hussein; and in the theocracies like Iran.

“So what you want to do, I think, is go to the most prominent one, the Taliban; got rid of that. Then you go to the next most prominent one, Saddam Hussein, and see what happens.”

At which point lunch arrived.