3 Responses to “Those Crazy “Middle Eastern” Doctrines”

1. Chris Sastre, on January 2nd, 2009 at 11:30 am Said:

   Hi Daniel,

   Happy New Year! I’m very glad to see you back to doing what keeps my productivity at work depressingly low - posting conservative thought that challenges every liberal bone in my body!

   As regards Victor Davis Hanson - everything I have read of his, principally at NRO [and admittedly not all that much] seems to revolve around a central tenet of finding ways to justify and rationalize military intervention, both committed and proposed, as a prime mover in American foreign policy. Several months ago I picked up a couple of his books - _Carnage and Culture_ and _Ripples of Battle_ - which I have yet to get around to reading.

   Have you, or any of your readers who may wish to comment, read either or both of these works? I have heard that his analysis is trenchant and atypical, his writing is very crisp and clear, and that, by not reading them, I am doing myself a disservice in my never-ending quest to become more clueful. However, I have found his NRO output to be offputting enough that I am reluctant to put in the time and effort to take these two works on. There are _so_ many wonderful and illuminating works, fiction and non-fiction, out there to devour that I would hate to waste time on these [admittedly brief] tomes, sans some manner of boosting from other than Amazon reviewers and his website employers.

   Cheers.

2. Daniel Larison, on January 2nd, 2009 at 11:36 am Said:

   Thanks for the comment. I have not read any of his books, and it is possible that I am missing out. From what I understand, his work as a classicist is fairly well regarded in the field, even if he and his politics are not. I don’t know about the volumes you mentioned, so I can’t say one way or the other. You are correct that most of his columns do seem to be focused on defending current interventions or justifying new ones.

3. Kyle R. Cupp, on January 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm Said:

   Hanson asserts the most of the world’s reactions to “this week’s war” are “reflections of our postmodern age, and completely at odds with the past protocols of war.” Personally, I think the postmodern condition should inform the way we think about war and apply the principles of just war theory, particularly the condition of proportionality. Proportionality includes not only the methods used but also the consequences of those methods. While I acknowledge the right to self-defense and the use of force in that defense, I question whether it is really possible to ensure that the force used doesn’t produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. The structure of the world today, marked by its interconnectedness and interdependency (e.g. global markets), opens the whole world to the consequences of a local act of violence, and therefore renders the knowledge that one is using proportional violence difficult if not impossible to acquire. In the postmodern condition, we have to decide whether or not to wage war without knowledge or perhaps even reasonable speculation about the war’s full consequences. Given this condition, I tend toward the position that war is no longer a suitable means of self-defense.

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