Blitzkreig

Just a quick hit today:

The always trenchant Victor Davis Hanson has a new essay up today which, as usual, is essential reading. Mr Hanson touches on BHO's adoption of much of the reviled George Bush's policy stances, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned, and wonders whether the enthusiasm with which his impending ascension is viewed in, eg., the middle east, is because the Islamists think he will be a better partner or because they think his naivete will permit the Islamists' agendas to advance. I wonder.

If, like me, you can scarcely get enough Victor Davis Hanson, you should not fail to visit his own Private Papers collection of online writings, and visit it often.

Last year I read his startlingly good account of the the Pelopponesian War, entitled simply A War Like No Other. For all the nuanced talk among our university elites since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 about the Americans being like the "evil," militaristic Spartans, I actually found much of his description of Athenian public debate to be not terribly dissimilar from the destructively self-indulgent flavor of much of our own internal debates. If anything, I found the Spartan singularity of purpose and desperate sense of self-preservation to be utterly beyond what our country is presently capable of, since we feel so securely unthreatened that we feel we can safely indulge ourselves a little bit with the pretty, subtle sophistry of our presidential campaigns and senate debates.

Also, if you are the least bit interested in the notion of assymetrical warfare, Mr Hanson captures the essential struggle between a nation with an unparalleled army and another with a supreme navy, what happens when huge infantry forces are confronted with tiny mobile cavalry forces, the mixture between light and heavy infantry on the battlefield, and honor and morale in combat. It's doubtless the best military history I've read, and I recommend it if you have any interest in either the Pelopponesian War or assymetric warfare in general.