Winners and Losers
Seeing through the fog.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
January 2, 2002 8:00 a.m.

o paraphrase Churchill, with the conclusion of hostilities in Afghanistan we are not at the beginning of the end, but rather at the end of the beginning in our fight against the terrorists. Although judgments in medias res are always hazardous, we can perhaps look back over the last four months and size up winners and losers that appear on the national scene in clear-cut antitheses. War takes away the luxury of peace, and so shows things for what they are rather than what they seem.

Before September George W. Bush was dismissed as inarticulate and worse. Pundits constantly and often cruelly reminded Americans that their leader had not mastered the intricacies and nomenclature of world politics. But September 11th revealed the president as quite a different person from his critics' caricature. Mr. Bush is, in fact, the Greek iambic poet Archilochus's proverbial hedgehog, the allegorically wise beast, who, unlike the supposedly clever foxes of the world, knows one — but one big (hen mega) — thing: how to galvanize his nation to fight back relentlessly and powerfully against evil in the hour of its greatest peril.

In contrast, his predecessor's impressive and near encyclopedic knowledge of names, dates, and places now appears little more than thin veneer, a glossy lamina that scarcely hid his real ignorance about the nature of the human condition. He, not the current president, wished to be liked at all costs and therein possessed a flaw fatal for a leader of the world's greatest power. Mr. Clinton's inability to pursue the terrorists and keep his country on guard against its noxious enemies is now judged as the last amoral straw that broke his camel's back of security lapses, unwise military cuts, impeachment, personal scandal and perfidy, and tawdry sales of White House visits and eleventh-hour pardons alike. The more Mr. Bush is terse and to the point, the more Mr. Clinton frantically flits from one public forum to another — whining about his legacy, lecturing the citizenry about its purported sins from the Crusades to the Civil War, and therein ensuring that he is no longer a tragic, but rather a comically absurd, figure.

Before September 11th popular wisdom suggested that bin Laden and his terrorists represented a new, vibrant, and deadly threat to a tired, soft, and decadent West. But the past four months have shown just the opposite. The true weaklings and cowards were the al Qaeda leadership. It, not us, cynically sent the deluded and young to suicidal murdering while it hid in caves, planned its escape, and churned out pitiful and self-serving videos.

The worse indulgence for a fanatical and "committed" terrorist is to appear worldly, gossipy — and petty. Bin Laden's tapes revealed all three sins. He brags of his rising ratings among the mosques of the worlds, but then, like a toddler in his terrible twos, bellyaches that our bombs were bigger than his and therefore not fair in his infantile game of tit-for-tat. He slurs blacks — as revealing as his chuckles over the fate of his naive henchmen who boarded the planes of death on September 11 — which must send a chilling message to Africans anywhere who might think that an anti-Western radical Islam offers the proper home for their own unhappiness with America and Europe.

In contrast, the United States military and its war makers loom not merely as deadly, but overwhelmingly so in a manner that reduces bin Laden and his ilk as unworthy of combat between equals — and therefore deserving not an honorable duel between real soldiers, but a quick incineration befitting criminals and cutthroats. Far from appearing as overly worried about losing soldiers in a ground war with terrorists, America's ability to kill without danger from high in the skies comes off as Olympian: the omnipotent do not think it worth their time to wrestle below with weak and shrill miscreants when they can dispatch them at will with thunderbolts.

The left, both on and off campus, has been reduced to a state of ethical insolvency — followed by silence — in the aftermath of September 11. The roll call of published idiotic remarks by the likes of Mary Beard, Eric Foner, Frederic Jameson, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, and a host of others has revealed that the luminaries of today's Western cultural and intellectual establishment are not merely ignorant of politics, history, and culture, but often downright immature, hysterical, and inarticulate. Marxism has been discredited as both murderous and impoverishing; postmodernism as hypocritical and nonsensical. And now we see that the only skeleton of an ideology remaining that feeds the elite left is a reactive anti-Americanism. But those old bones have little taste left given our power and humanity in waging this present awful war that we did not ask for.

How different are their antitheses. Real scholars over the past decades have perhaps garnered less glitter — a Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes, Donald Kagan, and others — but in the present crisis have in contrast offered blunt, unsparing, and sober appraisals grounded in history, an understanding of human nature, and clear and precise prose. The former intellectuals are of the moment and of no relevance, even as needed critics of their culture. The latter scholars prove to be engaged, principled, and prescient. Ironically, the traditionalists, not the universities' darlings, have done far more to salvage the entire notion of liberal education and the reputations of the great schools themselves.

These binaries of this war, then, also involve institutions as well as people. For two decades we have been worried about the ultimate harvests of the diseased groves of academe. The present war has exposed for public view young people in the military as knowledgeable as college students, their officers as well-spoken as professors, and the high command perhaps more well-rounded and engaged than university administrators. Again, we are not talking merely of common sense and practicality, which we expect from a military culture, but rather those visible and manifest signs of learning — logic, lucidity, and information — that is the supposed monopoly of our schools.

If this apparent paradox is true, the dichotomy presents a host of further disturbing consequences. Is our defense budget, then, complimentary, rather than antithetical, to social expenditure on education? Here I do not invoke just the negative notion that more money for guns means less funding for foolhardy programs in our schools that do real harm to our youth. Rather in a positive sense, can it be that a few critical years in the military produce youth as well-spoken, disciplined, and worldly as those on our college campuses? Do campuses need to learn from the military as much as the latter has from the schools? Seriousness, literacy, and written and oral communication must be shared by dozens of young people in order to catapult safely a jet plane off a rolling carrier — let us for a moment ignore questions of maturity and teamwork — skills hardly inculcated by counseling, journal writing, and gender studies so often found on the contemporary campus.

The war, however, has not embarrassed the Left alone. Many on the Right come in for needed reexamination. The officers of the Enron conglomerate appear not merely felonious, but biblically amoral in draining off money for themselves while destroying the life savings of thousands of loyal employees. In a time of war, such an energy corporation, which provides the lifeblood for a technologically advanced society, proves itself much more than duplicitous and incompetent. It is near treasonous as well, and has done its nation far more damage than the teen traitor from Marin County. Enron's leadership should be named often, and then roundly condemned by both the president and the Congress — as preliminaries to well-publicized indictments by the Department of Justice.

And under the false guise of "national security" — a slight against the very struggle we are in — our Congress is about to pass the largest farm bailout in history. Yet we know that family farms are rarely the beneficiaries of such ill-conceived largess; that the present legislation simply makes liars out of the architects of the "absolutely final" multibillion 1996 'Freedom to Farm' bill; and that the more the Department of Agriculture has grown, the more rapidly real agrarians have been obliterated. The latest gift to a few thousand corporate farms is little more than an insult to the memory of the rural vanquished. Faced with congressional passage of this monstrosity, any true conservative would either abolish the Department of Agriculture altogether, eliminate once and for all its welfare policy for select, campaign-donating agribusiness concerns — or, barring that, in the interest of fairness bring back the equally inequitable and dishonest give-away programs for the urban poor of the past.

War is merciless in the manner it cuts through cant and traditional wisdom. When men and women risk their lives to save their brethren, and the power of arms, not brag, decides who lives and dies, then truth emerges to expose pretense in ways we could scarcely imagine when the fighting broke out. And if the last four months are any guide to the next year, then we are likely to see far more unexpected winners and losers in the days ahead.