More Monday War Love From “Clap” Hanson

I had to laugh at the fact that the Philadelphia Inquirer gave column space to noted “classicist” V.D. Hanson today, who James Wolcott once described as “full of the ripest fertilizer” (on display also here in – where else? – The Wall Street Journal).

And it takes a particularly galling sense of entitlement, I would argue, to criticize others for writing books in which the authors attempt to escape blame for their actions in the Iraq war, when in fact Dubya’s foreign policy catastrophe, to quote that pop culture icon Chico Esquela, has been veddy veddy good to one V.D. Hanson in particular (I don’t think I appropriated that from anyone – sorry if I did).

I’ll ignore for a moment Hanson’s utterly preposterous attempt to propose a similarity between a work of scholarship such as Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” and some “through the looking glass” Bushco-simpatico yarn as Douglas Feith’s “War And Decision” (which looks strangely like “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward here; Feith can’t conceive of anything original, including the jacket design). I'll also ignore Hanson's equally laughable characterization of Clarke's work as a story of "how someone else did (him) in."

Instead, I’ll just take you to what is perhaps the definitive Hanson takedown written by Gary Brecher here (shocking that this was published on a conservative site), which is actually a review of Hanson’s tome “A War Like No Other,” including the following excerpt (the book is yet another attempt to parallel Iraq with clashes of ancient cultures)…

This book is just a point on the graph of Hanson’s decline. It shows him in the late stages of a wild ego trip, getting more and more thoughtless as he starts believing his own press. The whole book stinks of vanity, from the idea of thinking you could improve on Thucydides to the careless writing, the sleazy connections between alien cultures, and the big blind spot at the center of it all. Hanson has become so sure that the ancient Greeks are with him and the neocons that he can’t see how Thucydides’ story silently condemns our Iraq adventure. If only we could resurrect the real Thucydides and commission him to do a history of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Now that would be worth reading. But I don’t think Victor Davis Hanson would enjoy it.

Hanson once declared the Iraqi city of Ramadi as undergoing a rebirth of sorts under our occupation, though a Marine intelligence report from September 2006 declared it to be “beyond repair” here.

I think that is a perfectly apt description of Hanson’s literary career also.