What about Pro-War Academic Pundits?

Frances links to some great thoughts on punditry by Juan Cole. The Jebediah Reed piece at Radar to which Cole links is worth a read as well. Of particular note to the readers of FFB may be the fact that Reed employs the term clusterfuck!

I really like the premise of Reed's piece: let's see what all these pro-war pundits said before the war, what they're saying now, and how it has impacted their careers. Guys like Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, who on November 29, 2001 attended a pre-Iraq invasion pow-wow organized by Wolfowitz (himself now Prez of the World Bank) to craft some language that would justify the taking out of Saddam (as reported on p. 84 of Woodward's Denial; the meeting is confirmed by Zakaria, although he denies he knew it was to craft language for the war effort -- another attendee at the meeting says this denial is laughable). Now Zakaria struts around as a war critic. I can sympathize with Americans from all walks of life and educational backgrounds who were snookered about WMDs or whether it was a good idea to invade Iraq before the invasion, given that most of the reporting of the so-called "liberal" MSM also walked lock-step with the Bush administration and cheered it on (or were afraid to speak out), but I have little sympathy for those whose job it actually is to report the news. We rely upon them to at least check the assertions of our government officials, rather than become cheerleaders and speechwriters for their policies.

One conservative reporter whom I would add as an honorable mention to Reed's list is George Will. Michael Isikoff and David Corn (Hubris, pp. 159-60) report how in the Fall of 2002 during the run up to the war after the UN Resolution was passed, he was invited to attend a tête-à-tête with The Dick to discuss a book at the VP's residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. There were other notables at this same meeting, one of whom I will mention in a moment along with his book. There they talked about the upcoming conflict with Iraq. Now after-the-fact George Will, like his fellow frequent pundit of This Week with G. Stephanopoulos Zakaria, is also a big war critic. Funny how no one ever, or rarely, asks either of them or their other fellow pundits about these meetings, what they said and so forth. It would at least be gratifying to watch them plead the 5th.

We shouldn't, however, just pick on journalists. What about pro-war academic pundits? I'd like to hear from the rest of you about your favorite picks for academics who were cheerleaders for the war and now should be nourishing themselves solely from the egg on their faces. My number one pick goes to another attendee of that same party George Will went to in the Fall of 2002. His name has come up on this blog before – it's none other than Victor David Hanson. Not only has he walked lock-step with the Bush administration on Iraq, but he has walked in hoplite lock-step, publishing his inane pieces about how we're winning and we just need to persevere. It is not without good reason that in her column of April 10, 2003, Maureen Dowd sarcastically dubbed him Cheney's "war guru." It turns out that Cheney had read one of Hanson's books, The Soul of Battle, and was impressed with it. In this book Hanson profiled (or rather caricatured) 3 notable generals in history: Epaminondas (great Theban general who lead Thebes during her brief hegemony over mainland Greece circa 370-360 BC), Willliam Tecumseh Sherman, and George Patton. Hanson's premise in this book was that all three leaders were unfairly criticized in their own day for their ruthless tactics, but their willingness to show no mercy, to completely destroy their enemies, and to instill fear in the local populations had been effective and was necessary in war. Cheney had invited Hanson, Will, Scooter Libby, and Bernard Lewis to this affair in part to discuss the book. Cheney, Hanson would later tell Isikoff or Corn, clearly thought of himself as one such leader – willing to go balls to the wall with anyone and take the heat. He was a strategist, after all, who took the "long view." Cheney's viewing himself in the company of Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton is particularly disturbing and delusional given that he has no actual experience in the field of battle.

I will leave it to the rest of you to draw your own conclusions about Hanson's point about Sherman and Patton. As for Epaminondas, Hanson's entire premise about him is bullshit. Epaminondas was elected Boeotarch several times in the decade ca. 371-362 BC, and if he was maligned in his own day, it was by non-Theban and non-Boeotian sources, especially Athenian sources that dominate this time period. The point is whether you are maligned by your own people, not another country's. Worse yet, most of the other historians and commentators of the time, including Athenian sources, actually admired him as a "liberator of Greece", because he defeated the Spartan army at Leuctra by means of his brilliant tactical innovation of strengthening the left side of his own phalanx to take on the Spartan's stronger right side, rather than put his best men on the right to face the weaker left side of the Spartan line. An interesting historical aside on this tactic was that the core of this strengthened left side of the phalanx was manned by an elite corps of troops known as the Theban Sacred Band. One of the unusual qualifications of this elite group (think of US Marine Special Ops or Navy Seals) was that they had to be what today we would call homosexual lovers. Epaminondas thought that men who slept together would be more willing to die together and apparently he was right, because they were unbeatable until Epaminondas was killed at Mantinea in 362 BC. The ancient sources, in fact, are so overwhelmingly favorable to Epaminondas, that the famed Roman statesman and orator Cicero would later call him "the first man of Greece." So, Epaminondas was not unpopular in his own day, not even amongst many of his adversaries. Furthermore, it was his military tactics against foes in the field that won him the day, not ruthlessly harassing local populations.

The other misleading thing about Hanson's analysis is that he seems to imply that Thebes' merciless tactics began and died with Epaminondas. They did not. Thebes initiated the surprise attack on Plataea in 431 during a religious festival with the help of some pro-Theban oligarchic Plataeans. This unprovoked attack is considered the first salvo of the Peloponnesian War (Plataea occupies a significant passage between northern Greece and the Peloponnesus so it was highly prized ground). After finally taking the city in 427 with the help of the Spartans, Thebes settled the pro-Theban Plataeans back in their city, but one year later they apparently double crossed them, kicked them out, leveled the town and leased the land to Theban farmers (one wonders right now whether all along Bush and his cronies have been thinking about occupying the oil fields in Iraq if all doesn't go as planned). At any rate, Thebes occupied Plataea until they were forced to give it up in 387, but then 14 years later in 373 they attacked it again, destroyed it again and occupied again until 338 BC, when they, along with the Athenians, were defeated by Philip II at the Battle of Chaeronea. Shortly after Chaeronea the Plataeans were restored back to their homeland for the second time. So Thebes didn't suddenly become more ruthless under Epaminondas, and after he died, they continued their brutal tactics, but the problem was that eventually they ran up against new military tactics developed by Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great (using the sarissa spear in the phalanx...).

Now remember according to Hanson (as reported by Isikoff and Corn), Cheney was attracted to Hanson's book because he was a statesmen who thought of himself as one who could endure criticism of harsh war tactics in the short term because of his "long view." And what was the end result, what was the "long view" for Theban fortunes? In 335 BC Alexander the Great persuaded a bunch of other Greek states to join him in sacking, utterly destroying and depopulating the city, which they happily did. So just 27 years after Epaminondas died, Theban ruthless tactics eventually got a pay back, not only from the Macedonians, but other Greeks, including the recently restored Plataeans. Fortunately for the surviving Thebans, 20 years later Cassander decided to rebuild and restore them to their native land. The Thebans then learned their lesson and eventually even reconciled to the Plataeans and never again invaded other Greek cities. In 86 BC they were destroyed again by the Roman general Sulla for siding with Mithradates (dumb move to rebel against Rome), but they eventually recovered and became the seat of Byzantine Hellas. After a few more sacks and Turkish occupation, today nothing is left but a humble village built over the top of the ancient remains. Some American archaeologists, with the financial backing of David Packard Jr., a few years ago proposed buying up the entire village and excavating the ancient city, but the Greek government sensibly voted against displacing its local population for another big dig funded by foreign cash and under foreign control.

As for Hanson, like the pro-war pundits of Reed's piece his fortunes have improved too. According to Wikipedia he is no longer a professor at The Unversity of California, Fresno but a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute. He also has joined the class of punditocracy writing weekly columns for National Review and Tribune Media Services, and has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, City Journal, The American Spectator, Policy Review, The New Criterion, and The Weekly Standard, among others.

Possibly the only other scholar I can think of who could outdo Hanson is Frederick Kagan (as TPM points out, apparently the brains behind the recent surge and a scholar on Napoleon!). He too has attained something exceedingly rare amongst Humanities professors -- a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute that has allowed him to leave the academy.