Victor Hanson's Nightmare

Victor Davis Hanson works out of California. He was a professor of classics, and now he has a gig at the Hoover Institution. He is a frequent contributor to Commentary (neocon alert!) and other conservative mags. In this piece, Hanson takes his criticism of Mr. Obama's rhetoric on international affairs into the land of the strawman.

To give Hanson his due, some countries do have their own ambitions for power, glory, or ideological transformation which might be hampered by America's presence. However, it isn't our mere existence that bothers Iran, to use his most extensive example. We and the Iranians have acted against one another. We backed the Shah for years, when it was obvious that the Iranian people weren't buying his brand of modernization. This identified us with the source of evil for all of the theocratic revolutionaries. When the Shah fell, they went after us, too. They went after us in Iran. They went after our embassy and our CIA station, where, in their mythology, we had developed plans to help the Shah torture and kill his Islamist enemies.

Maybe he's right that Khomeini was after regional power when he ordered human wave attacks in the war with Iraq. But it's also true that 1) Iraq started that war (and expected to win it) to gain regional hegemony; 2) the United States backed Iraq against Iran (at least until the arms for hostages deal); and, 3) an overexcited American Navy captain shot down an Iranian airliner loaded with civilians.

I think Michael Scheuer, in his 2008 book Marching Toward Hell, has some of this right. No, the Iranians aren't nice people, and neither are Al Qaeda and the other Islamist groups. But they wouldn't be turning their anger against us if we were not present in their world. To be more precise, it is the United States' uncritical support for Israel, our support for nasty dictatorships in a number of countries, and our outright warfare against Arab and Muslim people that causes these people to hate us.

Hanson is right about one thing. If Mr. Obama only changes the rhetoric of American foreign policy, the results are going to be disappointing. There is substance to the reasons some countries are hostile to us, and that substance is not going to evaporate under a wave of oratory. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we'll keep getting what we've been getting.