Military Thoughts: From Israel, to Europe and the United States

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake of this show is Victor Davis-Hansen, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, farmer,

classicist.

He's an expert on just about everything, including politics.

This particular show, by the way, as you know, Victor, because we're doing it right now, on the 20th of January, which is a Saturday before the New Hampshire primary, this particular episode will be coming out on Thursday,

two days after the primary.

Hang in there for the next next episode of this show, which is the great Sammy Wink will host Victor, and I'm sure he'll be talking about the outcome of

the primary.

But today, Victor, on this episode, we'll talk about some military and foreign policy matters, such as Anthony Blinken proposing yet again the two-state solution.

for Israel and Palestine.

I'm going to ask you, Victor, and I think I know what you're going to answer.

Was the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin AWOL when he went AWOL.

And we'll touch on another topic or two.

And we'll get to all of that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I want to mention, by the way, that today, again, January 20th and tomorrow, the 21st, would be the 100th

anniversary of the death of Lennon.

And that

SOB's

project still continues on to this very day

in various forms.

But,

well, I think he certainly has influenced our friends, our early enemies in Hamas

and in Iran and their hatred for

the West and the hatred for Jews.

Well, Victor, The Secretary of State of the United States is this past week once again promoting that the solution to Middle East problems, Israel's problem, is a two-state solution, is a state of Palestine.

Victor, your thoughts.

Yeah, well, I mean, the Israelis are not opposed to dealing with Arab states.

They deal in a civil manner with Jordan and they deal with Egypt.

Their only objection is that

Egyptians, not since 1973, have been coming across their border.

They haven't.

And the Jordanians haven't either.

And Hamas

and the Palestinian Authority have had a half century of trying to kill Jews.

And so they have again and again said, you know, you can have Gaza.

We don't want it.

And they got out.

And the only reason they were in there is because the Egyptians said, we don't want it either.

And that was a battleground in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

And afterwards, the Israelis appropriated, they had settlers.

And Sharon got out.

He built built a wall, said, Take it.

The Egyptians said, no.

In fact, if you look at that wall, have you seen the wall between Gaza and Egypt, Jack?

It's pretty.

I mean, they don't mess around.

Yeah, I wish it was on our border, right?

Well, the International Criminal Court would stop us if we dare did it because

it just barbed wire.

I mean, it's got its, you know, its battlements and everything, but it's just got miles and miles of circular barbed wire everywhere.

And so they don't want people from Gaza coming in.

So my point is that all

I think what would need to happen is why don't they, why doesn't Blinken just say there will be a self-administered

West Bank and the international community will come in here and pour money in and supervise Gaza.

And they'll have a 10-year experiment.

If there is no violence and

there is a constitutional government, then we will have a timetable toward a state.

But they never do that.

They never do that.

They have election one time and that's it.

And that's

Mr.

Abbas was elected.

How many four-year terms has he had now?

I don't know, eight?

And how many have the Hamas people since 2006?

They get elected one time.

The West comes in and says, we're going to have a democracy.

Okay, yes, that's what we want.

And then the winner brutalizes or liquidates his enemy, and he never comes out of power.

So why would you want to turn your security over to that?

And so, but, you know,

the United States doesn't have to pay for anything.

I mean, when we fight our wars with failed states, they're way over there.

Israel fights this war.

They're right next to them.

So they immediately suffer the consequences of any post-war

utopian project.

And,

you know,

I don't think the United States said after we defeated Japan, oh, okay, you guys are going to have your own government.

No, we put MacArthur in there as pro-consul.

And he had absolute military authority.

And he redistributed land.

He gave women the right to vote, created a constitutional system.

And then and only then did we start to give it autonomy.

And no one said we were imperialistic.

We did the same thing with Germany.

And

I don't, nobody said we were imperialistic, but there was a big difference.

We defeated and humiliated the enemy.

And if you don't do that, then you're not going to be able to impose peace on them.

And that's the problem because we never let Israel defeat the enemy.

Right.

And we haven't let, and Hamas is probably going to, I didn't think that would happen.

I know that they've been degraded, but they're probably going to have

the ninth life again.

And they're mad now because they blew up the university, which I guess was on top of tunnels.

So the Israelis are in this catch-22.

They go into these 300-mile labyrinth complex from which there's all these

weaponry and munitions and terrorists, and they start to blow them up.

And then the whole city starts to collapse, right?

And then they say, you collapsed our city.

They never give you an alternative, especially the pro-Hamas people here.

They're doing this.

All you have to do when you say to them, and I have said this to them,

well, why don't you just have an agreement that the people who were responsible, forget about Gazans having culpability.

They do, but, you know, that happens.

Just return all of the hostages and turn over the 1000 or 2,000 people that are still alive that participated on October 7th and all the people who planned it.

How's that?

And they won't do that.

Right.

Well, it's all about brinksmanship, right?

Yeah.

You know, Victor, kind of appropriate or timely, you,

I think many of our listeners know that at Hoover, you oversee Strategico, which is an online journal.

And a few weeks ago, a new issue came out, issue number 89, and it's about urban warfare, old and new.

And there's a piece by Joseph Jaffe that touches, more than touches, on

what's happening in Gaza.

And then there's a

lead piece.

I forget who wrote it, but it's about the Battle of Manila.

That was Peter Monsieur.

Okay.

He's a very accomplished professor of military history.

He was chief of staff for David Petraeus in Iraq, and he teaches at the Ohio State University.

Well, you want to tell us about this new issue of strategic well we were trying where the prior 88 was on proxy wars and we have a number of them and it dealt in specifically in on Ukraine.

I might just add that we're going to have a huge conference.

I think we have 80 people stated to come in March at Stanford and we're going to discuss proxy wars.

I think we're going to start off with a classical historian, probably Paul Ray, and he's going to give us a description of all of the dynamics of Athens and Sparta fighting in a proxy war over Sicily.

And then we're going to talk about the Israelis' proxy wars and then the Cold War proxy wars.

Then we're going to cap off the eight-hour day with

any information that we learned or

historical patterns across time of space and how they apply to

both Ukraine and

the proxy war between, I guess it's Israel and

Iran, or maybe even the United States, Israel versus Iran, as it plays out in Gaza.

And there are

certain things you can determine about.

The same thing is about urban warfare.

There are certain ratios about how many people in an urban context, and even in general war, die per numbers of militants or armed forces or soldier people die.

And from what we can tell, I mean, the usual ratio is around nine to one.

Civilians will be that's what pretty much

happened in Mosul and Fallujah, eight to one.

And from what we can tell, I think the

Israelis are making a pretty good argument that they're two to one or one to one.

In other words, they may have killed 15 to 20,000 Hamas people.

I don't know how many civilians, but I think the figures that we're getting from the Hamas authorities are not only inflated, but they're including as civilians the Hamas people themselves,

the militant terrorists.

So we, and we talk about, and the Manila thing is very infamous because

there were a lot of people who advised MacArthur not to send the U.S.

troops into Manila.

And that was kind of, we had to destroy the city to save it.

It was a bloodbath.

Japanese wanted us to go in, sort of like they Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

And it was,

everybody should remember about the Pacific Theater.

The really bloody battles were not in 19,

end of

December of 41.

They were not in 42, they were not so much in 43, they were in

44, late 44, and especially in 45.

And why was that?

Because our policy of unconditional surrender meant we were not just going to defeat the Japanese in conventional battles and have them surrender or have an armistice, like World War I, for example.

We were going to

force an unconditional surrender, destroy the militarist government, and make sure they could never do that again.

And that meant, you know, they had a military of 3 million people and they knew we were coming and they were very sophisticated in their tactics and weaponry.

And it was terrible 44 and 45.

And Manila was one of them.

So it's talking about the rules of war as well in an urban context.

I think John Yoo has some good thoughts about that.

So it's a good issue and that's going to be replayed in March at our conference.

To our listeners on proxy wars, and we'll have some about, because these proxy wars, as we see in Ukraine and in

Gaza, tend to be urban war these days.

Well,

if you Google or search for Strategica,

it will take you to the Hoover Institutions page, and it's free.

And there are three articles in this issue, and there's many still very worthwhile back issues

in this

series.

So, Victor, you know, this reminds me, since we're talking about military, we should talk about,

get your thoughts on two generals and why do we do that right after

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I want, this is a lead-in here, to let our listeners, particularly our new listeners, know that Victor's website official official is the Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

Go there and you will find links to all the articles he writes for American greatness in a syndicated, weekly syndicated column, the archives of this show, Victor's appearances on other podcasts and other

entities on common knowledge, links to his forthcoming book, which, by the way, will be out in May,

and links to his ultra articles, which are the pieces three or so a week that he writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.

You need to subscribe in order to read them.

That's $5 a month.

Five bucks gets you in the door, discounted for the full year at $50.

So check that out, please.

And on occasion, Victor responds to

angry readers, and he responds in the ultra pieces.

But there was one piece that was titled Not So Angry

Reader, and this is from a woman, Barbara Tonshev, and she, I think, politely challenges you about something you said about General Robert E.

Lee.

And so two, I mentioned before the break, two generals.

One, Victor, it would be interesting,

your thoughts on Robert E.

Lee, since you just wrote about them for the website.

And then let's get your thoughts about Lloyd Austin's Secretary of Defense's sickness where he just disappeared.

And was it, I don't know, Victor, if a private disappeared like that, would he not be AWOL?

Is the Secretary of Defense not AWOL?

But General Lee and then General Austin.

Well, I had a very nice letter.

It was critical, but it was well, it wasn't an angry reader in the sense there was not all capitals and the F word and the S word and all that stuff.

It was was just angry that in the course of our podcast, I had not I had deprecated Robert E.

Lee.

I don't think I did deprecate him, but I didn't buy into the

marblized Robert E.

Lee.

And there's a good biography.

I reviewed it in the Claremont Review, a long essay by Alan Guelzo, who's a great historian.

Yeah, and he's terrific.

Yeah, he is.

And it's a very balanced, and my, just to summarize in reply to the not-so-angry reader, Robert E.

Lee was the most distinguished soldier in 1860 in the U.S.

military.

There were two of them, probably, Albert Sidney Johnson, who was killed at Shiloh, and Robert E.

Lee, who had distinguished himself in the Mexican War and the John Brown Rebellion.

He was from a light horse, Harry Lee,

the family.

He was from an old Revolutionary War.

Arlington National Cemetery was right there.

And

it was not clear that he was going to join the Confederacy because Virginia, remember, of the 11 Confederate states, it was the last one to succeed.

Because of its proximity to Washington and people,

the absorption and the osmosis between Washingtonians and Virginians and all of the presidents that had been Virginia.

I think they had more presidents from Virginia at that time than any other state.

So

it wasn't clear that Lee wouldn't be offered by Winfield Scott the

command of Union Armies.

In fact, he was.

And then he declined when Virginia succeeded.

And so then my point was that he was a good man.

He was a mannered man.

He took on enormous responsibility for a family that was facing bankruptcy and impoverished.

He probably wanted to free slaves.

There's some suggestion he whipped a slave on one occasion.

But he did probably want to free them, but he he felt he didn't have the labor or the money.

So he was, whether he liked it or not, he was fighting for a bad cause.

And he was a good man.

That happens.

You can make the argument that there were some Third Reich generals that were good men, that

General von Ritter or

even Rommel in some ways.

And they fought for bad causes.

But my point

is that he was a master of defense, and he didn't have the strategic, economic, financial, industrial knowledge of what makes

a modern industrial state win and what makes one lose.

So I contrasted him with William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a much more uncouth and probably

unstable person than Robert E.

Lee.

But in terms of understanding what would happen if there was a civil war and who would win and why they would win and which strategies would be successful and which would not, Sherman was an authentic military genius.

And he said that to David Boyd, a fellow professor at what would become the Louisiana State University, when he was

the president right before the outbreak, he said, you people in the South, you're wonderful fighters.

You'll win for the couple of years, but you don't make anything.

You don't even make the insulators on your telegraph pole.

They have 10 times the rail.

They have 10 times the industry.

They have a huge population.

And they're not wimps.

These people in Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin, these are some of the toughest people in the world.

They do their own work.

You'd be insane to fight these people.

And you will lose.

And I don't want you to lose.

And that was kind of a great speech he gave.

And then he went north.

And he had some troubled times, but he lost his command.

He said that they said he was crazy, Jack, because he said it might take three or four hundred thousand people

to subdue the South.

And that's exactly what happened.

But he was reborn at Shiloh, and then

he and Grant had this very successful partnership.

And they understood something, that they had to go down into the South.

And the South did not have to go to the North.

unless they were going to try some strategic engagement.

But the South could be fortress South.

It was the size of Western Europe.

And so what did the South do?

They had a Scotch-Irish military tradition, the Klauswitzian idea of the major battle.

Beat them, humiliate them.

And yet they did that at First and Second Bull Run.

They did it at Fredericksburg.

They did it at Chancellor.

It didn't work.

because of the resources of the North that could afford to do that.

The only chance they had was not to get Lincoln re-elected.

And that was, if they won a decisive battle and humiliated the Lincoln administration, then maybe you would get General McClellan and maybe he would allow

a peace and the Confederacy could, you know, succeed.

That's what they were hoping.

That was the only strategy that was viable.

My point is that Robert E.

Lee then went into Pennsylvania with a beautiful big army of 70,000 people and he destroyed it.

And he destroyed it, of course, at Gettysburg.

And there were people, you know, he had two brilliant corps commanders.

Unfortunately, one of them, Stonewall Jackson, was killed, and the other, Longstreet, the next year, was severely injured.

And Longstreet told him very famously to not have

a head-on battle with the Army of the Potomac and General Meade, but to sidestep them in Sherman-esque fashion, which Sherman would do the next year in Georgia, go to Washington, just like Jubilee early later would try to do, and humiliate the government and take Washington.

They probably could have done it, but he didn't.

And the rest is history.

And yet Lee, in 1864, when he was defending the area around Richmond, he almost won the war in the sense that Ulysses S.

Grant had to destroy the Confederacy inside the Confederacy, and he lost 100,000 casualties.

And those battles of 1864 are just nightmarish.

Mary Todd Lincoln, remember, said, he's that butcher.

I don't want anything to do with that butcher.

That was First Lady said that.

And

we won the war because this maniac, which the letter writer mentions and doesn't like him because she said he was an adulterer and sex, he came up with the idea that this is a martial culture that puts a high

premium on battle efficacy and chivalry.

And we're going to go down there with a huge army of the West.

And these are not people from the East Coast, no offense, Jack, but from Minnesota and Michigan and Iowa and Illinois, and they're homestead farmers, and they're tough.

And we're going to cut the rail lines and we're not going to depend on them.

We don't care about the Nathan Bedford Forest of the world if they try to sabotage it.

We're going to live off the land and we're going to take Atlanta before the election.

And we're going to destroy it.

And that is going to get Lincoln re-elected.

And that's exactly what he did.

And then they said, he's done.

And he said, no, I'm not.

Lincoln said, he went in some hole and I don't don't know what hole he's going to come out of.

And he took this huge army, and he made a 50-mile swath through Georgia, and he ended up at Savannah right before Christmas.

He did not destroy, he did not kill very many people.

There were some rapes, and there was some...

foraging and destruction, but he concentrated on destroying rail lines, government buildings, and plantations.

They freed 40,000 slaves in the process.

Was he a modern liberal?

No.

He was uncouth.

He probably had racist sentiments, although no Union general probably did more for slaves than William Tecumseh Sherman by freeing them.

He gave them the land, the islands off the Carolinas.

When he got to Savannah, they said, he's done.

He said, no, I'm not done.

I've got to relieve the pressure off Grant.

So he corduroyed

Rhodes, and he went right through the swamps and back

country of the two Carolinas and pulled up in pretty much

on the other side of Richmond.

And that was what forced the South to concede.

And when you read his memoirs, and they're beautifully written, as are Grants, he's talking about

how to use the manpower of the North and how to invade the South without having a Grant-Clauswitzian bloodbath.

And he could do it, he felt, by humiliating the plantation class, by creating divisions between Southern society, between the white poor who did not own slaves, 97% of the population did not own slaves, and the plantation class.

So he centered on the Howell Cobbs and the Wade Hamptons of the world and wanted to humiliate them.

And he was very clear about it.

And then finally, was he,

she said that he was an adulterer and he had a mulatto girl.

That was sort of anybody in the North who was an enemy of the South, they always said the same thing.

He had a mulatto girlfriend.

So I don't know

contemporary letters.

He was pretty much under the public eye all the time in those marches.

So I don't think that is verifiable.

It is verifiable that

after the Civil War and after his

Western career as head of the U.S.

Army in the West and the so-called Indian Wars,

he moved to New York and he was a fixture of the New York play scene, Shakespearean plays, drama.

And during that time, he had enormous power

and influence, things like he could influence how many, there was a monument craze in both in the South and the North, but especially in the North.

And if you wanted a contract to be a sculptress or sculptor, you went to William to come to Sherman.

And a lot of young women did who didn't have avenues.

And there are some letters that suggest he was romantically involved.

He was an orphan from his father, and he had been adopted by one of the wealthiest families in Ohio.

His brother, John Sherman, was the author of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Very well-connected family, and their father died, and they were destitute.

And this very, very wealthy Ewing family nearby adopted him, and he married his foster sister, Eleanor.

And she was a wonderful wife.

And when he had depression or he,

held 17 jobs before the Civil War, he was a complete failure.

He was a teamster.

He was a banker.

He was a railroad guy.

He tried insurance.

He tried law.

He tried everything.

But he had one job.

Was he out in San Francisco?

Yes, he was.

But William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of principle.

And so when the bank collapsed because of shenanigans back east and he had enticed depositors, he paid them back himself.

He was at odds with what he thought was modernism.

He was very stubborn, but he was very principled.

He dressed like a private.

He slept on the ground.

The men called him Uncle Billy.

They loved him.

He created the most powerful army in the U.S.

history up to that point.

When they went into the military parade following Appomattox and they marched in Washington, D.C.,

he did not change their uniforms.

He did not give brand new blue uniforms like the Army of the Potomac.

They were not people from immigrant countries.

They were not urban people.

They were suntanned and they were dressed in rags after marching for a year through Georgia, across Georgia, up through the Carolinas.

They lived off the land and they had black pioneers, brilliant black people they had freed who were able to help them forage, to build roads, engineers, as they called them, and pioneers they called them as well.

So when they marched, marched, they had the whole army.

He refused to have new uniforms.

And they were these big,

tough farmers that had won the war, and they marched right after the army and the German military out to Shea and the Europe said, oh, my God, this army could take anything in Europe.

I'm glad that they're going to disperse.

And he hated the Secretary of War,

Stanton, who had treated him very terribly.

And people wrote at the time, if Sherman wants to take over the government, he can without army.

And he just, he wanted people almost to think he could.

And then he

met across the Potomac, said it's over, and peacefully disbanded the Army of the West.

And

that was the end of it.

But he, I think he could make the argument, and I've written about him in a number of books.

I think he could make the argument that he won the Civil War in a way.

I mean, that's kind of unfair to Grant.

He said at one time, and Lincoln said there was the terrible arithmetic, and he said there had to be 300,000 cavaliers that were killed.

It was kind of ruthless.

And Grant did that.

700,000 people were killed.

It was an

horrible bloodbath.

But they worked in tandem.

So if you're a Grant fan, he held Lee's

fixed so that Sherman could come around the rear and destroy infrastructure and break down the civic solidarity of the South.

If you're a Sherman fan, why Grant was bogged down and not making progress, this man destroyed the solidarity of the South.

But they were complementary.

And the final thing is he was very similar, and I wrote that in a solo battle to George Patton, and he was an authentic military genius who was very, very learned, philosophical, and understand the larger play of war, that you were fighting against not just an army on the field, but a psychology, an ideology, a national character, an economic infrastructure.

And Patton knew that.

And he, if he was a philandering person, as a letter writer, alleges that would have been in his 60s or late 50s and 60s when he was in New York.

And there are some letters, as I said, that survived that are sort of, it's hard to tell in the Victorian period what people said when they said, you're very beautiful and I love the way the hair falls upon your shoulder and all that.

But he wrote letters like that to some women, but he was very similar to Patton in that one thing that

Victor, I do want to,

but I'll just finish.

I'll just say one similar thing.

Sure.

George Patton was saved by his wife.

She was from the Ayer Drug family, one of the wealthiest family in the United States, Beatrice, and she was absolutely devoted to him.

Not just because she was in love with him and he was the father of their children, they'd been married, but she understood that without George Patton, the United States Army would be in big trouble.

And she was going to do everything she could to make sure that he was promoted to the position that he deserved by his talent.

And when he slapped two soldiers in Sicily on two occasions, she was the one that stood by him and used all of her influence to make sure the Roosevelt administration put pressure on Marshall, who put pressure on Eisenhower to get him back in, even though he didn't get the participated in D-Day.

And she was very similar to Eleanor Ewing in their absolute devotion, and they were were brilliant women and they kept these two mercurial people viable when both of them were going to be relieved.

Sherman because he had a so-called mental breakdown.

I don't believe he did, but that was what he said he was crazy and Patton because he'd slapped soldiers.

And if they had been off the battlefield, the Union and the American armies would have been in bad trouble.

Well, that was terrific.

Although about 10 minutes ago, I did want to pipe up and say something in defense of the the Irish Brigade and those wimpy easterns.

I'm a quarter Irish.

My grandmother was a full-blooded Irish woman on my mother's side.

Okay,

let's get your take on the second part of that question, which

had to do with General Lloyd Austin and his disappearance from the Pentagon.

Okay, he was in a bad way.

He went to the went to Walter Eat, I think, and had

cancer issues, but

he was off the grid and

got

a blessing or not a recruitment, no recrimination from President Biden.

Victor, can you think of anything in American military history where such a thing happened and how egregious was this act?

And as I asked earlier, like,

what if a private, what if a corporal had done something comparable?

There would have been penalties, I think.

Your thoughts?

This happened a lot.

I mean, but it's pretty, they either, in the past, when Curtis LeMay was right before the war, he was piloting the B-17 all the way down to, I think it was the tip of Chile, he got Bell's palsy.

He just put a cigar in his mouth so that people didn't want to see the spit coming from one side of a paralyzed mouth, but people were aware of it.

Ike had heart problems.

He hurt his knee terribly

during the Normandy campaign.

He couldn't walk.

People were aware of that.

Matthew Ridgway had a heart attack right after World War II, and he was pretty candid and he said he could still, they wanted to, they discussed it.

So

people really, I mean, that generation was more likely to hide physical ailments than our generation.

But I think what Austin did, there were two things he did, and I can understand why he did them, and they were both,

I think, naive.

The first is he works for a president that's not there.

So I doubt that Joe Biden, in the fashion of most presidents, called him every day and said,

what's going on with the Houthis?

What are we going to do?

What's the capability?

Can we bomb?

Can we use cruise missiles?

Can we take these out?

What is the deterrent force of our carrier?

Are we going to have another carrier come back in the Mediterranean?

What do we do with Hezbollah?

Those questions are not being asked by Joe Biden because he doesn't know them.

He doesn't know where he is.

So Austin felt, well, you know what?

I have this prostate cancer diagnosis.

He didn't tell anybody, of course, but nobody's going to know because Joe Biden's never going to call me.

He never calls me.

So I'll just go in.

And the second thing is I think modern medicine has downplayed the severity of a lot of our maladies.

You know, you meet people who heroically are fighting lymphoma or even leukemia, and it's suggested that these are all treatable diseases, and they are, but they can be very debilitating and deadly.

So I think in the case of, I know so many people that have had prostate cancer and

they have been treated and they have had very little downtime.

They've either had the radioactive pellets or they've had the prostate removed or they've had hormone therapy.

There's all different strategies.

And I guess we all have a rendezvous with it.

But my point is that it's a doable.

So I think that people told Austin, yes, you have prostate, but you usually die from prostate cancer unless it's a very virulent form rather than from it.

So you can come in and we will do this procedure.

You know, I guess he called it a minor.

I don't think it's ever minor when you have cancer, but that's how they termed it.

And they either were going to do something of the things like just one of those types of procedures and he was going to go home and that happened.

But then he got infected.

And he's, you know, he's 70 years old.

He's not necessarily trim, and you don't get the feeling that he's a jogger.

He's too heavy.

And so he had comorbidities.

And then he got incapacitated, and he had to go in an emergency into the intensive care, and nobody knew it.

And his second in command was on vacation, and the spokesman who was supposed to apprise us of this had the flu, supposedly.

So who was in charge?

And so then your question is, was he AWOL?

The question, the answer to that, what would he do if his CENTCON

commander or his African commander, if he called him up and they said, he's in the hospital.

And Lloyd Austin said, what?

Where's my CENTCON commander?

I want to find out what's the deal with Iran right now.

And they said, well, he didn't want to tell you, but he is in the hospital.

He's having a procedure.

And it would have been easy.

He thought he could talk to you on the phone, but he had complications.

So he's in intensive, what?

Lloyd Austin would have removed him.

I'm sure of it.

And he probably would have anybody in the military.

And if you were a private or a sergeant and you said you didn't tell anybody that you just, you're supposed to report for duty on Monday, you have a Sunday off, you go in for a surgical procedure, and it doesn't work,

and you're in the intensive care and you don't tell people

that matter, that is the chain of command.

And by that, I mean who's higher than the Department of Defense Secretary, and that's the president.

Apparently, he didn't notify the president.

So is he going to be removed?

No.

Why is he not going to be removed?

Because

Joe Biden is in an election year right now, and you don't, in his way of thinking, you do not remove an African-American general, not after Claudine Gay.

It's going to be, people have already suggested that.

I'm not being original here.

I just am reflecting what I've been reading.

And

if he did remove him, people would say to Joe Biden, well,

you're the president.

We don't even know where you are.

You don't show up for five days.

We didn't hear him, I think, two weeks ago, for five days.

So he's gone three or four days a week in his vacation home or his main residence in Delaware.

So he is not going to be able to condemn him.

It's kind of like Donald Trump.

He cannot, there's been rumors.

I don't know if you saw it it in the Daily Mail, Jack, about when Nikki Haley

was accused of having two affairs

and their sexual liaison, the partners each signed affidavits.

I don't know quite why they did that.

It seems to me very ungentlemanly-like.

If you have a liaison with someone, you don't sign it, you don't.

publicize it.

But maybe they, apparently they got angry that she was bragging on her marriage and all of the loyalty that she had expressed to her husband and family when he was deployed for months at a time.

These two people who had had supposed liaisons, it's not confirmed, but they said, oh, this is hypocritical.

And they probably had a political agenda as well.

But my point is Donald Trump is not going to use that.

He's just not going to say that.

How dare you?

Your husband was working.

And, you know, he can't because of Stormy and all of these other things.

So my point is that Joe Biden is not going to say, you mean you didn't show up for work?

What's he going to say?

Joe, you haven't showed up for work for probably, I don't know, 300 days since you've been president.

So it's going to blow over, but it's a bad precedent.

And the problem I have with it is that

There is something

very wrong with the Pentagon and with our armed forces.

And I'm a big supporter.

I think everybody realizes what I've written of generals and admirals.

There are some wonderful generals and admirals at the Hoover Institution.

I've met a lot of colonels.

They're good friends of mine.

But let's be frank,

we're short 30,000, 40,000 soldiers.

And they said that it had nothing to do with anything other than obesity or gang activity or low unemployment and

competition against private enterprise.

But we now know the statistics that so-called white males from the South or rural areas

or the suburbs are just 50% falloff.

They're not joining.

And we know why they're not joining, despite the denials of the Pentagon.

They're sick and tired of being saying that they're white supremacists or they're white privileged.

When they run an internal investigation to hound them, they find there was nothing there to begin with.

It should have never been investigated because it didn't exist.

They're angry because 8,400 of them have been drummed out of the military.

They're angry because we were humiliated in Afghanistan.

They're angry because it seems like so many of our flag officers at two, three, four stars revolve right into multi-million dollar lucrative lobbying and defense contractor board seats.

They're angry that our generals tend to be very political.

Mark Milley, the Chinese connection going over to his Chinese counterpart, warning him against Donald Trump,

saying that he shouldn't have had a photo op with the president, which they all do.

All this politicalization, and then the retired generals calling the president the commander-in-chief in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, calling him Mussolini or Hitler-like or Auschwitz cages and all this stuff, liar.

It's not good, Jack.

And so this incident is a reflection that

let's hope that somebody comes in, a strong Secretary of Defense, and says the following.

We are not going to promote and retain

and recruit people on their race or gender.

We're not going to, we want to know how well they are on the battlefield as leaders or administrators, but we're not going to have this

trans,

gay, feminist, marginalized person criteria that hampers battlefield efficacy.

It doesn't mean you can't be sensitive to different backgrounds, but that's not going to be the primary.

And we have something wrong with military procurement.

We have weapons that are too expensive and too few.

And I don't know why it is, but when you retire and you're a one, two, three star four general, you're not going to be able to work for a defense contractor or serve on a lucrative board for 10 years.

And we're going to go back to no more exemptions.

If you are a general,

you're not going to be able to be Secretary of Defense for 10 years.

And we've waived that in the last two cases.

So

I think we need radical changes and we need to have a whole different approach to our munitions acquisition.

We really need to build a lot of drones, a lot of cheap weapon systems, and stop building $14 billion carriers that can't go into the South China Sea if Taiwan is in danger, or putting 5,000 men and $14 billion in one confined space in the era of small, cheap drones.

So if somebody from the Navy can say that they're going to put the USS Gerald Ford

and 5,000 of our fellow Americans right off the coast of Taiwan, and it has perfectly able to perfect it, to defend itself from 4,000 swarming drones that are coming in at two in the morning and missiles that are about three feet long that are skimming across the ocean about an inch above the water.

They can defend it.

That's fine, but I don't think they can.

So we need to make more weapons, a lot more, cheaper, more numerous, et cetera.

And we need to rearm.

We really do.

If you want to have peace, you're going to have to prepare for war.

And so is Europe.

Well, yeah, let's

talk about

Europe preparing for war, Victor.

There's a power line piece up by John Hendricker, and let's get to that after this

final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, before we

get your thoughts on Europe and war drums, I just want to take a minute to welcome back one of our sponsors, Hillsdale College.

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So Victor, this past week on Powerline, which some listeners will remember is the first, I think it's the first website you go to every day, Victor.

John Hendrecker, one of the three potentates there, wrote a piece.

It's titled War Drums in Europe.

Suddenly there is talk everywhere of war in Europe.

On Monday, I, this is John, wrote about, and he links to warnings from Germany and Sweden of a possible Russian invasion.

The drumbeat continues, and he puts in some significant links from a variety of British newspapers,

you know, fretting about war.

And this is how his piece ends.

And just bear with me here, and Victor, then we'll get your thoughts.

He writes, what to make of this talk about war?

European leaders obviously are preparing their citizens, i.e.

voters, for the reality that the decades of easy living since the fall of the Soviet Union are likely over.

More will need to be spent on defense.

Armies and navies will need to grow.

Complacency will need to give way to vigilance.

There is another theme, too, that Europeans can't rely on America to bail them out.

The U.S., they say, is preoccupied with our Pacific rivalry with China, a far more formidable adversary than Russia.

We Americans, Europeans are saying,

accept Europeans to be mostly responsible for dealing with a threat to Europe, which is not unreasonable.

The 20th century

was mostly defined by conflicts that originated in Europe.

For a time, it seemed that such armed conflicts were a thing of the past, but perhaps not.

Very worrisome, Victor, but

no mincing words there.

Your thoughts?

Well, you can start on the Russians.

I think we have discussed on this podcast, and I have written too much about it, it, about the Russian way of war.

And we look at 1939 in Finland, where they took a terrible beating.

We all praise the Finns, but we forget the denouement, and that is they won.

And they didn't care about the costs.

And yes, they took a terrible beating in 1941, in July, August, September, and all the way into 42, even to 43, Tulkursk.

And they won.

They lost 20 million people, the Russian Russian people, and 10 million in the military, but they won.

And they went into Afghanistan and they fought 10 years, but when they left, they didn't leave the way we did.

They went in an orderly fashion out with their equipment.

So my point is, and I could go on about the invasion,

anytime they go outside of Russia, they have problems.

But I think this reaction is they looked at this and they said

after that miraculous and brave defense of Kiev by the Ukrainians in February, March of 2022, they said, you know what?

The Russians are paper tiger.

They're terrible.

And I think a lot of us said, yeah, they are.

They're fighting outside their borders.

But what usually happens, they still win because they don't care about casualties or they're autocratic and they have a, when you fight near their borders, they get patriotic.

And they do better on border.

They do better when they fight on their home soil, but they do pretty well when they're fighting near their border.

They don't do well when they're a long way away.

Okay.

So they've watched this Ukraine war and they were told that the spring and summer offensive were going to be patent-esque.

They were going to just punch through.

They had leopard tanks.

They had Abrams tanks.

They had all sorts of anti-tank weapons.

They had sophisticated Bradleys.

And you looked at the aerial photo of the Russian defenses.

You said, please please don't do that.

Why would you do that?

You have only one-fourth the amount of soldiers.

Your economy is 10% of the size of the Russian economy.

You have 1 30th of the territory.

Please don't take those precious soldiers and try to, like our stupid ram, blast through that fortified two miles of tank traps and drones and mines and concrete and ball.

Don't do it.

And they did, and it didn't work.

And now people are terrified of the Russians.

They thought, oh my God, they've lost 300 or 400,000 casualties.

And they've got these sanctions and they've got all of the Western world against them.

And they're winning the war.

How can this be?

We better be careful.

They could do the same thing to Sweden and

Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia.

So they're in a period of paranoia.

And they know they're not very well armed.

Finland and Sweden Sweden would put up a good fight, but the rest of Europe and Poland would put up a good fight.

But Western Europe, no, they don't have the weapons.

They don't have the attitude.

They're not prepped.

And we are so worried about Taiwan and China.

And we have depleted our stocks by supplying Ukraine and Israel and leaving them in Afghanistan.

We're not prepared.

And so this is this general sense in Europe.

Wait a minute.

Russia is not fatally weakened.

We thought that Ukraine would just bleed him white and then we wouldn't have to worry about Putin.

But now that he's in a warlike mood and he's recalibrated the Russian economy and our so-called friends like the Indians and the Chinese are buying his oil and Iran is supplying him.

He's a monster and he could go into our countries and we're not prepared.

So there's this paranoia now in Europe and maybe good.

Maybe they'll start to rearm.

But they remind me so much of the French army in the 1930s or late 20s.

They had won the war and they did not want to fight another war.

And Germany had lost the war and they very much wanted to fight another war.

And they were a socialist country, Germany, France was.

And socialism was very hard to prepare.

whether financial or military or manpower deterrence.

And the army of France that had stood firm at Verdun collapsed six weeks.

And so that's what I think they're worried about.

We have socialist economies.

We don't create enough munitions.

We don't have a sufficient arms industry.

We haven't inculcated civic virtue and patriotism in our youth.

You can't make disparate peoples want to fight on behalf of the EU flag.

They're not going to do it.

You can't tell a kid in Florence to leave his cappuccino table and run over to fight in the dirty muck of Poland for the idea of the EU or the idea of NATO.

You've got to have a patriotic, nationalistic army that is self-contained.

And if they're going to fight, they're going to be side by side as national units, very well armed.

The tragedy of it all is the West makes much better weapons in isolation and in theory than does Russia.

And we always have, we always will, and China too.

But we don't make them in enough numbers and enough,

they're not dispersed throughout the necessary countries, and

they're not regularized, and so it doesn't really matter.

The Russians know how to make basic, deadly weapons in great numbers, and they don't freeze when their young people get killed, at least so far they haven't.

And the Europeans understand that now and they're terrified.

And they look at the Biden administration.

They praise the Biden administration at Davos.

They praise Blinken.

He's the kind of international diplomat and he's the big supporter of NATO.

But secretly, when they're privately, they say, I think I

don't Trump right now.

because he would build up the unit.

the military and he'd scream and yell at us.

But if they crossed our borders, he'd come.

And that's their dilemma.

Well, Victor, let's conclude.

We have a few minutes left and shift from all these thoughts military to

thoughts hysterical.

And you've written, and I don't mean funny hysterical.

I mean

your most recent syndicated column, which is getting quite a lot of attention and talk, the hysterical style in American politics.

And I think anyone, Victor, that has a phone sees a video and

increasingly, rampantly,

ideologues in the streets have taken,

yeah, to what we would consider you're hysterical, the kind of thing that once upon a time required a slap in the face to get you out of it, you know, screaming and tantrums and antics

that are

require psychiatric care, I think.

But tell us, Victor, about this column and why you wrote it.

Well,

it starts with the idea that most people innately don't believe in socialism.

Every time it's worked

and it's a quality of result and people are not rewarded on their individual work and initiative, it doesn't work.

And this administration is the most socialist we've seen since the 30s, and nothing is working.

And so they need a majority to hold on to power.

And so

they have to have a crisis.

They have to have a crisis.

And so what I was talking about is, to start off,

this

crisis is that Donald Trump is a monster and he's a threat to democracy and he's going to be vengeful.

It's just a projection of what they would do if they were in his places and had suffered like he did.

And so they want to terrify people, just like during COVID.

They said, oh my God, we're going to i i there's no cure.

It's going to we've got to vaccinate everybody.

We've just got to turn over everything to Moderna and Pfizer and save us.

And six feet, it's scientifically proven.

You have to have six feet and we're going to shut down the whole country in a quarantine.

And you ask, where is the scientific evidence?

It doesn't matter.

And, you know, people were crazy.

And we shut down the schools and we had an epidemic of missed cancer appointments, morbidities, suicides, drug abuse, familial abuse, spousal abuse, economic destruction, still haven't recovered.

It explains the George Floyd.

But under that guise, people like Gavin Newsom said, hey, we can get a more progressive capitalism.

And he did.

And Hillary said, we can expand health care.

And she did.

And Jane Fonda said, this is a way to get rid of Trump.

And they did.

And we can go back to George Floyd.

They had wanted to defund the police for a long time.

The BLM and TIFA people wanted their agenda to be mainstream.

They wanted to judge people on the basis of their race.

They wanted thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They wanted loyalty oaths, DEI, McCarthy-era-like oaths.

And they could never get it through.

But you tell everybody that George Floyd was a saint and all these riots.

And they looked at 120 days of rioting and 35 people killed and 1,500 officers hurt hurt and injured.

And as I said, courthouses and police things going up and smoke and $2 billion of damage and downtown Washington, downtown Seattle occupied.

They said, oh, my God, I get in a fetal position.

What do you want?

What do you want?

We'll give it to you.

And that's what happened.

And they did the same thing with...

September 2008.

People forget that that was a meltdown around the 7th, 8th of September.

And you had September of Bush, October of Bush, November to Bush, December of Bush, and January of Bush, almost five months.

And in that time, they had saved the country and they had done things that were pretty left-wing with the bailout of Wall Street, whatever you want to say, things were stable.

And we were starting to go into recovery mode.

And had they, when the Obama administration had come in, they just said, you know what, we're going to allow the economy to recover naturally.

And what did Rahm Emmanuel say?

You never let a serious crisis go to West.

So it was hysterical.

And all of a sudden, they pushed through Obamacare and they pushed through all-time new regulations and they pushed through a higher tax rate and they stalled the economy from 2008 all the way to 2017,

basically.

We didn't need to do that.

So what I'm getting at is whether it was the COVID or whether it was Donald Trump is going to kill us all or whether it was George Floyd shows you that the police are mowing down people with machine guns and and we've got to defund them, or whether it was the economic crisis and where we're all going to be impoverished unless we nationalize this and give money to Solyndra and shovel ready jobs and borrow 4 trillion.

They always have to seize on a catastrophe.

And then they get through what they want.

And what they want is Donald Trump.

It's going to destroy democracy.

Insurrection, January 6th, a good exit.

That was a buffoonish riot.

That was a peaceful protest that turned into a buffoonish riot.

And anybody who went in the Capitol, when it was against the law to go in the Capitol, should have been prosecuted.

It was not an armed insurrection.

There was no one that those protesters killed, not one person.

There were not five officers who were killed.

Officer Sichnik was not killed.

There were five people killed.

Four of them were on the protester side, and one of them was shot while unarmed by going through an already broken window.

And so did you, did you see how he, was it right to say the cop that shot her lied?

Officer Bird, yes, he did lie.

And now we learn only way after that it wasn't just that he left his

weapon in a restroom.

He'd had a number of complaints against him.

He was not a good officer.

And when you look at the different angles of the film, you see that there were people in body armor who were fully armed that were much closer to her and right looking at her.

And they didn't draw their weapons.

He was at an angle and he shot her.

And he said after the shots, like it seemed like he was covering up in a sense, like he shot her, killed her, or shot her on the side.

She bled to death.

And then

he put out a minute later some like, I'm hearing shots.

Well, I mean, it just sounded like he was creating evidence after the fact.

If you're anywhere in the United States, I don't care whether you're in a red state, blue state, white-dominated state, black, you name it, race, demography.

If a police officer shoots fatally, lethally, an unarmed suspect, especially if she's a diminutive woman, That officer is put on immediately, but more importantly, the media make sure that his identity is known almost immediately.

Officer Chauvin with a George Foy, his picture was plastered all over the newspaper within hours online.

Everybody does that.

We did not know Officer Bird's identity for several months.

They kept it quiet.

They said

it was intolerable, racist to even suggest you would know the name.

He was going to be subject to all these threats.

And that was what got people very angry.

And then the media went after her and they started probing her.

And they said she was a conspiracy freak.

She was a QAnon, that she was in a weird sexual

relationship with people.

They just defamed her character.

And they didn't really say, wait a minute, this woman was a 14-year-old, 14-year military veteran.

And she was about 5'2 ⁇ , and she weighed about 110 pounds.

And she made the mistake of going into the Capitol when she shouldn't have.

And she committed a misdemeanor probably of going through a broken window.

And she was basically executed for that.

Shot.

And,

you know,

that's what it was.

And yet we never heard that.

So, what I'm saying is they use that insurrection.

And we saw it with the January 6th committee at Lynn Cheney when the only Republicans that could be in that committee, you had to fulfill two criteria.

You had to hate

Donald Trump's guts and renounce him.

And you had to be politically inert with no political future.

Lame duck.

And if you fit those two criteria, you could be on there.

No cross-examination.

Most of the videotapes and a lot of the transcripts are missing.

And you could railroad that through and convince America that this was

a full-fledged armed insurrection.

And then hysteria followed.

You weaponized Washington, 30,000 federal troops.

You put Barbwire everybody.

And then you tell

Joe Biden to mention it every time you can't.

Democracy was almost destroyed.

And then you get Matthew Rosenberg from the New York Times, pulsar printing, left-wing journalists, he says in an ambush interview with Operation Veritas.

What are you talking about?

It was fun.

There was no, these get a grip.

I walked out.

There was no danger.

I saw all these FBI informants.

And now we're told 30, 40, 50 informants, 60, 70, might be even 200.

What is so hard with Christopher Wray just coming before Congress and saying, okay,

this is the number we had in 182 or 174.

Why doesn't he say that?

Can't say that.

And so there's something that nobody's talking about January 6th.

Tucker did, and he got fired.

You know, I'm not saying that that was the reason, but they did tell him not to air that anymore.

They being, I guess, the news core board.

But

nobody wants to know the full epoch.

The Epoch Times has a great documentary.

I urge everybody to watch it.

It's kind of like the George Floyd documentary by the wife of one of the officers who was,

I guess,

incarcerated.

And she's got things in there that you never knew.

Oh, okay.

And everybody should watch that because

nobody

in May of 2020 said,

George Floyd is a habitual felon who violently had a home invasion, put a pistol at a pregnant woman's stomach, had been arrested a year before and resisted arrest.

At this particular occasion, the police were called because he was in the act of trying to pass a felony, counterfeit currency.

He was told to sit, arrested, and be quiet.

He resisted

continually arrest.

He suffered from cardiovascular disease.

He suffered from the effects of, I guess, a prior COVID infection.

He

suffered from high levels of dangerous drugs in his blood.

He may well have taken drugs to hide them during the arrest process.

And the initial autopsy report did not suggest that Officer Chauvin, with that grotesque grin on his face, I think that was the most incriminating thing that got people so shocked.

He seemed to not be worried about when he said, I can't breathe.

He should have stopped, even if that wasn't the cause of his breathing.

That was more internal because of the drugs and his physical condition.

Nevertheless, he should have stopped.

But the point is that that's far from the idea of a renegade policeman deliberately picking on an innocent victim and putting a knee and breaking his windpipe or suffocating him.

And yet, that was used, that crisis was used to cause untold damage, destruction, and death in our major cities in the ensuing three years.

Smash and grab, carjacking,

police forces shattered, mass retirements,

all-time highs in murdered police officers 23 and 22,

epidemic of attacks on law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's what I was trying to talk about, the hysterical style.

And I was trying to channel the political scientist, a man of the left in the 1960s, Richard Hofstetter, wrote a seminal article.

I think it might have been in Atlantic.

I'm not sure.

It was called The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

And

it's been widely refuted, Jack, but his point was, it's full.

If you read it, I read it again.

It's got a lot of Freudian lingo and all of this about paranoia.

And his argument was that Barry Goldwater

was nuts paranoid and saw a commie under

every bread and was in the McCarthy, Joe McCarthy strain, which I don't think he was.

And therefore, that was endemic among right-wing people.

You know, you could see it in Doctor Strangelove, the caricatures that everybody on the right was worried about fluoride and the water.

Pretty, you know, it's something to be worried about.

And precious bodily fluids, and these people are crazy, and it's typical of the Republican Party.

I was saying

the thing that's really typical is the hysterical style of the left, because they have an agenda that never appeals to people, at least since the modern welfare state was created.

And wow, they have to have a crisis to gen up so they can push through legislation that no sane person

would support unless they thought they were going to die from COVID or the 32 depression was back, or they were going to walk outside and there was going to be a policeman shooting them down or COVID, you know, it was

everywhere, and we were all going to die of Ebola-type disease.

Yeah.

Grandma's dead because you, you,

you looked at her.

Yeah, I mean, it's just insanity.

Well, Victor, um,

anyway, that's it.

Yeah, no, so I want to recommend folks, if they want to see that piece, go to Victor's

website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You'll find it there.

We're about out of time, and this is the point where I will make a little pitch for what I do.

I write Civil Thoughts,

a free weekly email newsletter sent out by the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we are determined, determined to strengthen civil society.

It is so damn important to the success of the United States.

So

what do I do in Civil Thoughts?

14, excuse me, articles I've come across in the previous week that I think you will enjoy or find interesting.

I give an excerpt and the link.

It's free.

Go to simplethoughts.com and sign up.

We don't sell your name or any jazz like that.

Hey, I haven't mentioned this in a few

podcasts, but if you're interested in following Victor on Twitter slash X

at

V D Hansen, that is his handle.

On Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup.

And there is a friendly, not official, but a very friendly group, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club that is on Facebook.

Wonderful people.

It's about 60,000 members of that.

Okay, so that's all that.

And then folks can,

well, I just have to read one lovely comment made, by the way, Victor, about the piece you've written on hysterical style.

um

this is a comment put on your on your website it's from lewis bowles

and uh lewis writes you sir have the ability to put into a few short sentences the very things that are so very relevant to our current situations when i read your articles i'm reminded of the late charles krauthammer there is no higher compliment i could possibly make thank you for all the great work thank you lewis and everybody else who leaves comments there or those who leave comments and rate the show on iTunes and Apple.

We appreciate all of that.

So, Victor, you've been terrific as ever.

I look forward in tomorrow, and tomorrow being a Friday of,

geez, I don't know, is that the 27th, something like that, the 26th, to listening to you and Sammy, as you will no doubt be discussing the New Hampshire primaries and the state of American politics at that point.

But that said, thanks for everything, Victor.

Thank you, folks, for listening.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening once again.

Much appreciated.