Comeuppance, Conquest and Terror

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Hello, everybody.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show and Victor is the namesake of the show.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is available on his website at victorhanson.com.

That website's called The Blade of Perseus.

You can join for $5 a month or $50 a month or just get a free subscription and you'll get on our mailing list for the the new things that are on the website which there are a lot of things that do not require a subscription so please come join us victor we have a lot on our agenda today we're going to look a little bit at interviews going on by the house committee and just by other places from christopher ray and merit garland but let's take a moment for some messages and come right back

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We're back.

Victor, I know I usually ask you how you're doing, but I noticed something that they're talking about their snow at on March 1st, 2nd on the Hollywood sign.

And I know that you have a mountain home that's two-story, but I hear that it's been turned to an igloo just about.

And I was wondering if you had a thought or two on that.

Well, you know, I went up there after the big early storms in December and we dug and dug and it was okay.

And then I thought, it'll be like last year, a good December, and then we'll be in the so-called climate change drought.

But then it really snowed in a historic fashion in January.

And

I hired a guy up there with his assistants who did a great job.

And they took like six or or seven feet off the roof.

So I was worried that even though it's an engineered roof, I thought it might, and they had to put it down and then they, and then they took it away from the house.

Then the next one hit and I went back up there with my wife and we cleaned everything out.

And we thought, well, it's going to be

warm and this is kind of an overreaction.

And then my daughter and her family went up and it snowed again.

And then they had to repeat the process.

So then it was basically tolerable.

And then this latest one was more snow than all of the other ones put together.

And the road up to Huntington Lake has been completely blocked.

You can't get up there.

And I think there's 10 feet on the roof.

And I'm told from people who...

are up there that the the snow is touching the edge of the roof and I hope the house is still there.

Wow.

It's it's It depends.

A lot of it depends on the type of snow.

You know, if it's full of water and has a high water

content, Sierra cement, it's very heavy.

If it's a light, it's not as heavy.

Well, it's been very cold, so I expected it's probably really light because the cold will make it very, very light snow.

So

something told me, even though the roof was, I had built the house in 2016 and the roof was only, you know, 2006, excuse me, it was only about 16 years old.

And I thought, well,

I could probably, but during that fire up there, it loosened some of the signals, the sheer heat.

And so

I, you know, I didn't know what to do.

And I just bit the bro bullet and then put a whole new roof with a fiberglass pad underneath it, a

presidential H or whatever it is, HD heavy-duty roof.

And I'm glad I did now.

And I hope that that will

do it.

Yeah.

Hey, have you?

Did you see the second husband?

I'm not sure what he's called.

I know he's Kamala's husband.

I don't even know his name, but nonetheless, he was giving a little talk or excursus on the problem of toxic masculinity.

And I thought that was rather interesting.

I don't see how the left doesn't see that as that's just an opinion number one.

And what somebody sees as toxic might be to other people just fine, right?

So I was just curious if you had any thoughts on

him.

And I've heard him, he's, I think his name is M.

Hoff.

I think it's his second marriage.

I think that they were trying to bait him or because Tucker Carlson talks a lot about

the antithesis of toxic masculinity and that is no masculinity.

But the problem with all this, and I think everybody knows instantly what I'm talking about, there is toxic masculinity.

You know what it is?

It's Murdoch killing his wife and child with a gun and acting, you know, as if he can do anything he wants.

It's two teenage boys

beating to a pulp a young defenseless girl.

It's a doctor riding a bicycle down the PCH in California and being run over, knocked off his bike and executed.

That's toxic masculinity and it's criminal masculinity, but it's not masculinity.

And so this idea that we're suffering from toxic masculinity,

we're suffering from toxic femininity, masculinity, dash.

I mean, think about it.

We have a whole generation of young men who have failed to launch.

They're living at home or they're living

with friends, but they're not going out and getting married and having children and buying a home and getting established we have a prolonged adolescent problem we have seen the most radical drop in fertility in the united states since the great depression we went from 2.1 in 1999 we're down to about 1.6

and that's because primarily young men are not marrying and having children.

They don't want to take on that masculine responsibility.

So for this guy, just

you know, M.

Hoff, just to say, oh, toxic masculinity,

well, we need a little bit more masculinity to make these people, you know, man up to their responsibilities as providers and protectors of a family.

They're not doing that.

And yet, here's a guy who's a multimillionaire and he's a very privileged person.

He can talk, toss this off and toss that off because it thinks

it sounds great.

But I think everybody knows that we don't have a

masculinity.

So when somebody is on a bus,

I shouldn't say somebody,

a tiny little girl has been beaten up and there is an attendant or a driver, there's no masculinity there.

Or when a little boy is being choked to death, almost choked to death, there's no masculinity there.

Or when this guy slowly loads and tries to load a gun and they're all watching it and they're filming it and nobody, I mean, I don't blame them, they're gump, but nobody runs over there and tackles him before he can load his gun.

So we don't have a masculinity or chivalry, I should say, in the old sense.

I think it's really important that a lot of this passive-aggressive culture derives from that.

You know,

a lot of women say, well, we're vulnerable in the workplace from toxic masculinity.

No, you're vulnerable because you have a lack of masculinity in your midst.

And what do I mean by that?

You're at the water cooler and somebody walks by and said, hey, babe, and snaps your bra strap.

There's no man that says, what the hell are you doing?

Don't do that.

It's none of your business what she wants.

Don't do that.

In other words, they don't step up.

And I think a lot of people who are listening to this are in my generation.

I'm 69 and they were taught that, to do that.

I know that I had a mother who was kind of a trailblazer.

She

had been a very attractive woman in college.

She married my dad.

She had

two bachelor's degrees and JD in the 40s from Stanford.

And she raised her family and then she returned to work in her 40s.

And she was the only woman in

a court that was all men.

And if she came home and was right in the face one day and said to all of us,

this lawyer kind of cornered me and pushed me.

I didn't know what to do.

There was like a nanosecond.

My dad was in the car, and Zoom.

He looked like he was launching a rocket, driving the 30 miles up.

What the hell are you doing?

You don't ever do that again.

That's what men used to do.

You know, I know that there were men that were too casual and sexist and all that, but there were also men who didn't like that and they protected the women and their family.

I know women listening to this will say,

How chauvinistic.

We don't need protection.

Well, maybe I think it would be great if you're all, you know, kickbox artists or,

you know,

boxers or jiu-jitsu or karate experts.

But for those who are not, it might be a little bit more conducive to the general tranquility if men would step up when they see other men acting violently or misbehaving.

And

that's what I think I didn't understand.

The problem in this country, in other words, is not toxic masculinity.

It's the lack of any masculinity.

And that's what I'm really worried about because I think everybody listening has members of their family,

children, cousins, nephews, nieces, brothers, whatever, that you're worried that they're not going out and having their 2.1.

children or they're not on their way to adulthood in their mid-20s and they're in suspended animation.

They're ossified.

They're calcified.

And that's not a very masculine thing to do.

And yet, whether it's video games or surfing the net or porn, I don't know what it is, but they are spending

too many men in America, young men are spending a lot of time.

Part of it is the sexual revolution where they don't have to make any effort.

to court or to be civil or to date a woman.

In other words, it's just, you hook up.

It's almost if you're a tribe.

You don't go on a date.

You don't say, hello, I'm John Smith.

Hmm, Emily Jones, I would like to take you to dinner and to a movie.

They don't do that anymore.

It's very easy.

Hey, man, what are you doing?

Come on and buy sometime.

If you want, I don't care, but I'm playing video games.

I'm going to come over.

And then, you know what?

And then they come over, hey, let's have sex.

Why not?

That's the problem.

That's not very masculine.

No.

That's what I'm trying to get at.

Yes.

Yeah.

So we see it on both sides.

Well, maybe we should turn to

the House is investigating both the China or sorry, COVID virus.

And of course, Merrick Garland is there for all of the various arrests that are made that don't seem to be the equal application of justice.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were.

First, Christopher Wray out talking to Brett Baer of Fox News about part of the interview, I'm sure it was much longer than this, was on the Chinese lab and the possibility of the leak from the lab.

And that China, and he even said as well that China was trying to thwart the investigation, the international investigation of this.

So

I feel like he's trying to get out there in front of what the House committee is doing.

And then also your reflections on Merrick Garland and in whichever order you'd like.

Well, I mean,

Jon Stewart was made fun of by his own leftist compatriots.

That idiot Stephen Colbert made fun of him because he just said, hey, man, there's something called the Wuhan Virology Lab, and then there's a Wuhan virus, and they're right next to each other.

And so

this is what we knew pretty much, I don't know, within the first three months that A, the Wuhan Biology Lab was engaged in gain of function research, and partially it funded from Anthony Fauci by rerouting those dollars

to Echo Health.

It was illegal in the United States.

That's why we wanted to use the lab.

And we weren't the primary, obviously, benefactor.

Number two, it was controlled by the People's Liberation Army.

Number three, there was no case whatsoever,

not one animal before humans came down with it.

Number four, a lot of people, Stephen Kway was on this broadcast, have looked at the genetic sequencing and said that doesn't happen very often.

It's almost impossible in nature.

Number five,

why was the Chinese government so paranoid about it?

Why didn't they just come clean if it was just, you know what I mean?

And a bat, it's not their fault if a bat jumped, you know.

And why did Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and everybody and Peter Dassett get so worried about trashing everybody who thought this?

Why the paranoia?

And why did the left adopt this as sort of,

you know, if you deviate from the orthodoxy, you're a conspiracy and we're a racist and all that.

So

everybody knew it came from the lab, but you couldn't say it.

And people who said it, like Tom Cotton, remember he wrote a

New York Times op-ed piece and the newsroom went crazy.

And that led to indirectly to the firing of the editor, James Bennett, because he allowed it to happen, allowed it.

He should have, you know, but it was, it just was crazy.

And that shows you that the power of

trillions of dollars floating in the global marketplace from China, 340,000 Chinese students, Chinese faculty at all the universities, all the universities price gouging Chinese students to make up for their incompetent budgeting, and were so deeply compromised by China that

it's almost impossible to criticize them.

And then you had Donald Trump, and he deliberately took them on.

called it the Wuhan and the way he said China, you know, China, China.

And fine, but they hate Trump so much that they thought, ah, Trump thinks it's from the lab.

Therefore,

it's racist to say it's from the lab.

But we all knew it was.

So Christopher Wray and the FBI and

Department of Energy have now basically said what everybody else knew.

And of course, the left went nuts and said, this is racist.

And how dare Christopher Wray.

That was the only thing, if I could just take a breath, that he said in that interview that

was acceptable.

I mean, they ask him so many questions.

Hey, when somebody is protesting

at an

abortion clinic and a person sort of insults and threatens his son and he pushes the person back and then you send a SWAT team basically to his home and you don't do anything, anything about all of these much more frequent attacks on pro-life shelters, but you send SWAT teams after a married guy with kids at his home and frighten his family.

And you go to Mar-Lago and you doctor the floor with this sloppy photo op.

You put files down as if Trump had thrown them down there.

And you go full SWAT when you go into Mar-Lago.

And then with Biden, you sort of what?

You sort of say, hey, the lawyers found some.

Okay, you guys run your own investigation.

Investigate yourself.

That's what we do at the FBI.

Oh, by the way, oh, you want to keep it quiet before they admit?

Yeah, that's fine too.

And then they call up, hey, you know, we found another one.

Okay, you can investigate that too.

Until finally the outcry was so much.

And then he tried to pass that off as symmetrical is what I'm saying.

Is that the same as

how we treat abortion clinics versus

pro-life shelters or how we treat Trump?

And on and on and on.

I mean, it was just,

it was absurd the way that he couldn't answer the questions.

And then the worst was, and this was both Merrick Garland, Merrick Garland, if I could shift gears, but also Ray.

So you have all these mobs

massing at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices.

In the case of Kavanaugh, they ran him out of a restaurant and they're threatening him.

And that is a felony.

You cannot go to a justice's private home and scream and yell about an impending case with the purpose of trying to influence their decision.

And what did they answer?

Why weren't they indicted or arrested?

And what did Merrick Garland say?

Well, there was federal marshals there.

I'm thinking, oh, so you commit a crime, and because marshals show up that prevent you from

accelerating and going escalating to the next level of criminality, you get a blanket exemption from the crime.

So

I guess I go downtown, I take a rock, I throw it through the window and break the law, and then I'm ready to hit another one, and then all of a sudden I see there's police in there.

So I refrain from breaking another window.

And that refraining on my part means I'm never charged with the original offense.

And

we were supposed to listen to that with a straight face.

And then the worst thing was they asked him about the asymmetry between pro-life and abortion violence against these different respective groups.

And he said it has something to do with

nature.

Can you, he says, well,

they attack the pro-life at night and they

attack the abortion

during the day so we can get them at day.

And I thought, do you have any data that supports that?

Are you saying that right-wing, violent people have more guts to do it opening and left people just do it stealthy at night is that your point or is at five o'clock does the fbi go home so you never have any or do criminals go home so you're trying to tell me that all the criminals in the united states either don't commit crimes at night or you can't do anything about it so you just say well he murdered a guy at two in the morning and i can't do anything about it if he'd done it at two in the afternoon it'd been a different case i mean that was so absurd yeah

again i've used that phrase so often but they think we're stupid.

And for him to sit there and try to, and then the Virginia parents, you know,

there was terrorist threats.

It was just a joke.

He's, and,

you know, if I could just make a slight deviation.

This was a bad week for the mad president.

I mean, he's a lot crazier than George

III,

Biden is.

I mean, think about it.

This week we had his DOJ telling us that whether it's light or dark, he'll go after a particular violent offender, or trying to tell us with a straight face that if you commit a crime, but you don't commit another crime because there's an officer there, then you're not going to be indicted.

Or

Christopher Wray trying to tell us that the FBI does not use inordinate force, or he doesn't want to talk about hiring Twitter out as an FBI contractor to suppress information.

We've gone through all the other stuff.

As I said on Fox the other night, is there anything the FBI will not do?

I don't know anything.

Wipe away data on phones, doctor court evidence, pay Christopher Steele a million bucks if he can find one true thing.

And then when he can't, you still use his dossier to go after your political appointments, et cetera, et cetera.

So this was a bad week for the mad president.

So then you had Pete Buttejig.

So you had his DOJ guy and his FBI guy.

Then you had Pete Buttigieg.

And he said he was going to to be remembered for, what, eternity, because of his climate change advocacy.

So, I'm thinking, that's it.

You're afraid to go to East Palestine for two weeks.

And the ports are supply chain madness.

They're ossified.

There are ships out to the horizon.

We had a huge labor railroad problem.

There were

five near-misses

with aircraft, and one of them was a hit in the LAX and then we had the entire air grid shut down over the holidays or computer glitch and then Southwest Airline and this is just and you're you you you you mr.

Buddyjig are either a

on maternity leave B

on a private jet junket at our expense somewhere

or C

saying that this happens all the time.

There's a thousand a year.

big deal.

You ignore it.

R D, Trump did it.

Trump did it.

The wheelbarrowing went out because Trump deregulated the brakes.

And the wheelbarrowing, I guess, are the same as the brakes on a rail car.

And then after all of that, he says he's going to go down in history for his climate change advocacy.

And even if he did, I want to know what it was.

Can he show a little chart and said, Department of Transportation, taken over by Pete Buttigig, January 22nd, 2021?

Look at carbon emissions.

They went down.

What has he done?

And so you had him.

Then you had Majorkas mouthing off about the border is secure, why they were testifying that 100,000 people died a year from these cartels, assembly factories that are designed to export death to us in league with the Chinese that are supplying the raw product.

So Garland.

Buttigig, Mayorkas, Ray, that's the mad president's team.

And then what about the mad president?

In one week, just take an average week of our president.

What did he do?

Besides the slurring and the

coherence, he said three things that I remember.

Maybe you do too, Sammy.

He said

1,000, 100,000, and Marjorie Terry-Greene blames me.

Trump did it.

I mean, he was laughing at the deaths of 100,000 people.

And he blamed him on that the rate was more under Trump.

It wasn't.

It was much less per year in his four years than Biden's two.

And yet he was laughing at

item number two.

So if you think, then he said, as he was pandering to his Black History Month crowd,

even though I'm a white boy, I'm not stupid.

Okay, so you're saying that all white people are stupid,

but even though you belong to the stupid class of white people, you're not one of them because you're not stupid.

Is that what he was saying?

That all whites are stupid, but even though I belong to the stupid white class, I'm so exceptional I should be given what, an exemption?

That was just horrible, man.

That was just crazy.

That whole speech was crazy.

Yeah.

And then we get to the peace de resistance.

What was that?

He went into the full corn pop fashion again.

And remember, anytime he goes off the teleprompter, Joe Biden is in danger of going into corn pop territory.

These are kind of Homeric type scenes where he repeats a story and he kind of changes a detail like he's a Homeric blind bard doing it from memory.

And they're completely irrelevant, but

they do, these vignettes

and his actions when he's off the teleprompter have something in common.

A, he either will physically blow into

the ear or the hair of a young girl.

B when he's done or he's coming up to his talk, he will hug too long a mature woman.

C,

he will call out some young teen in the audience, you have pretty eyes, look at her, and try to embarrass her.

Or D, D, he will tell a creepy, eerie, weird story that's semi-pornographic.

And this category was D

this week.

So to top off.

Yes.

So he says, well, you know,

healthcare nurses are just great.

Now, you know, when I was flat on my back from brain surgery, this nurse, and he named her name, I don't know what, that was really embarrassing.

She was so good.

It was a human connection.

And I was laying down and she bent over me and

blew her breath on me and then blew in my ear.

And that's a human connection.

I'm thinking, yeah,

any male was laying flat on his back.

If a woman bends over him and then blows hot air into his ear, I think that is a connection.

And then I thought, I have heard this before.

And so I went back and

I didn't realize that the media was doing it at the same time, but I didn't read it in the media.

I just Googled hot breath, Joe Biden blow.

And he told it before.

It was Homeric.

It was different.

And the earlier one, she blew into his nostril.

Think of that.

That's a human connection.

I can say that I'm 69 years old and nobody.

has ever blown into my nostril.

Has anybody blown into your nostril, Sam?

No, nobody's ever blown into my nostrils.

I don't think you, yeah.

I mean, the only thing I've ever done with my nose is use the neti pot.

My God,

blown into his nose.

That was the earlier version.

I don't know which is which.

And

I don't know what he was doing there when he was channeling Genesis, you know, in the Bible when God says he blew, I think he said he blew into the nostrils of mankind life.

Maybe that's what he was doing.

Maybe.

This was into corn pop territory.

Remember in corn pop territory,

he looked for a minute on the campaign film.

His eyes have that kind of corkscrew that go around and around like cartoon eyes.

And he looks like he's nuts.

And he thinks, and then a thought goes into his brain that says, Joe, don't do it.

Do not do it.

If you start lying and telling your stupid fables, you're going to embarrass yourself.

I have to do it.

I have to do it.

I got to act like a he-man tough guy.

So he went into corn pop.

And then at one point, he said, and I get along with everybody.

In fact, when I was lifeguard, I was tan, man, and my golden hairs were there.

And those inner city black kids like never seen golden hairs like that.

I used to let them touch them.

He didn't.

Did he do this in this recently?

He didn't do that.

No, but it was the same type of genre.

So, this man is telling us that inner-city kids touch his little hairs on his leg and nurses breathe into his nostrils or his ear.

And

it's creepy.

Yeah.

Something's sick.

And that's the same week that he laughed about opiate overdoses.

And he, oh, no.

You know, that he, he chuckled about it.

It's bad.

And it's, these things just keep going on.

It's, he's, he's mad.

Yeah.

You're telling, you're telling Joe Biden stories.

Can I just insert one?

Because when he finished that State of the Union address, nobody noticed this, but he went up to that Hawaii, I think she's a representative, Hirono.

Hirono, yeah.

And he did the old put both hands.

Must be believed.

Exactly.

He put both hands on the top of her head and started the caress down her hair on both sides.

And she like grabbed his hands when they got near her shoulders and like pushed him away, like, not this puppy, you hair-breathing

Nick Porcus, not this pig.

So, yeah, I mean, so that was all in one week, these creepy,

you know,

I mean, what, what, I mean, they made fun of Trump all the time when he said things like, Haiti is an SHIT hole, but that was off the record.

And that was leaked.

And it was true.

It is.

But

what if Trump had said, hey, I may be a white boy, but I ain't stupid.

Or

Obama killed more people than I did.

Or he said, you know,

when I was in the hospital, a woman had been over.

So when he said he grabbed women, that was off the record to that Billy Bush was an obscene thing to say, but he was a private citizen 10 years earlier.

And they went nuts about that.

But this president can say things like, hey, junkie, or you ain't black, or hey, boy.

The only good thing about when he said, I may be white,

I may be a white boy, but I'm not stupid, was he actually referred to himself as boy.

That racial derogatory epithet.

Usually he calls black people boy.

Remember he said to the, I think his name was Cedric Raymond, the A down in Louisiana, he was down there and he said, hey, I got a boy down here working on.

And then the governor of the newly elected black governor of Maryland, he said, hey, this boy is a, this boy is something, you know?

Yeah.

This is just incredible that this guy is A, completely incoherent.

not in control of his cognitive facilities, an abject racist, an abject sexist,

and the left gives him a complete pass because they find that his sonality is useful.

They say to themselves, man, this guy is embarrassing.

And he kind of embarrasses because he's a racist.

We know he's a racist.

And, you know, we know he's a sexist.

And we know he's a crook.

But he's our racist.

He's our sexist.

He's our crook.

And he's going through.

He's so compromised that he made a Faustian bargain and he's carrying through this agenda.

We're getting all these identity politics appointments.

We're watering down crime.

We're trying to cut back on gas and oil.

We kind of got

rid of the toxic masculine image abroad when we fled Afghanistan.

He's been delivering, man.

We got an open border.

We got 7 million new Americans.

That's how they look at him.

In a weird way, I think everybody understands you can't criticize him because he's not responsible for what he says.

In other words, it's like your great-grandfather, your great uncle, or you're a member of your family who's suffering from Alzheimer's.

You just don't make fun of them.

And when they say something stupid, you just say,

so that's okay.

That's.

Yeah.

Yeah, but there's a law out there.

You don't become president of the United States if you want that kind of sympathy.

I mean, I'm sorry.

You can give him that.

You don't become senator from Pennsylvania either.

Exactly.

And you're not an 89-year-old senator from California that can't remember?

Yep.

No, it's called, we don't care whether you're anything.

All you have to do is be physically in the Senate or in the White House.

And when somebody takes their, like that old Star Trek episode, puts your hand to sign or to vote, that's all that matters.

And so I think everybody should realize that,

I know, I'm just not spouting off, really, I'm sincerely,

I mean this, the left

does not care about racism.

It does not care about sexism.

It exhibits daily racist and sexist attitudes.

It care or ableism or ageism, any of those ism.

All it cares about is power, power, power, power.

and the welfare of the bicoastal elite classes of all different identity politics groups.

And therefore,

if Joe Biden's diary says he took a shower with his daughter or his son is a crackhead and manipulating women and vice versa

on the laptop, or if he can't keep his hands off pre-teenage girls, or if he says some things that are eerily and spooky and creepy, it doesn't matter.

He's useful.

And that's how it is.

Yeah, that's very sad.

Well, Victor, we better take a break here and come back to talk about Alexander the Great.

This is our weekend episode, and we like to do a little history.

So stick with us, and we'll be back to talk about Alexander the Great.

Welcome back, Victor.

So to change the subject completely, although that was a fascinating discussion that flowed from Merrick and Ray into Joe Biden in his speech, so I really loved it.

But to get on to Alexander de Gray, he's our next

conqueror and has the impact on the West that we're looking at after the Peloponnesian War.

So

I'll go with what you want to talk about.

And then if I have some questions, I'll insert it.

Yeah, we're trying to just go through history, and we're going to try to do this for maybe a year

We started with the Persian Wars, we did the Peloponnesian Wars, and now I'd like to talk about just for 10 minutes Alexander the Great.

So, everybody knows Alexander Magnus, the famous conqueror and destroyer of the Persian Empire.

And there's a lot of false knowledge about him.

He died at the age of 33.

Basically, he was

in power from the death of his father, who was assassinated, Philip II, and he inherited the Macedonian kingdom that's north of Greece

when he was 20, turning 21.

He had fought at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 with his father.

He was 18 years old, and he led the cavalry charge on the left wing that broke the Theban sacred band.

So he was...

he was very precocious, but he was on the outs because in the Macedonian

marriage protocols, his father had remarried a young girl and she had had a baby and he was going to be out.

So I don't know whether he was involved.

There's a lot of speculation he was involved in the assassination of Philip II.

But everybody would like to know how did this little backward place in northern Greece, I know it had wealth, Pella and Regina and all these Macedonian cities, but it was tribal.

It was in the outback of Greece.

A Greek in the city-states, I think, would find

Macedonian as someone at Oxford would try to understand somebody from the Bronx or from Alabama.

You know what I mean?

They not only would not be able to find that, follow the dialect, but they would look down on it.

And so

out of that, and how did Philip do it in 20 years?

That is, do it, meaning conquer the Greek city-states.

And the reason is he refashioned the Greek phalanx.

He had been a hostage as a young boy in Thebes, and he had learned from the great strategist Apamanonis of Thebes.

But what he did was brilliant.

He took the hoplite spear of nine feet and he lengthened it to 16 feet, called it a sarissa instead of a pike rather than a spear.

But that required two hands.

And then a lot of weird things happened from that fact.

If you have two hands, you can't carry a shield.

If you can't carry, and you're a mercenary soldier for the most part, because you're not going to be heavily protected with all that weight as citizen soldiers whose life was much more dear to the militias and the city-state.

So he has these professional pikemen, and

they're very heavy, so you need two hands.

They put a little thing, I think it's in Greek, it's called a pericardion.

It's a little plate around your heart.

And they were trained

day and night as professional troops, unlike Greek hoplites that were militias, I said.

And notice that if you're in a phalanx and you have 16 feet, you have nearly double the killing

zone of a hoplite.

So in a hoplite eight feet, eight men deep, you only can hit, only the first three rows can hit the enemy.

The rows, we don't really know what rows four to eight were, but they were either to push, and the word in Greek is off these moths, and give greater propulsion to the phalanx, or they would stop the craven from backing out, or they would step up as reinforcements, or they would, like a Napoleonic column, they would be eerie and project power.

But he doubled that from 8 to 16.

And so if you were facing a Macedonian, there were 40 more points in your face.

because row one, two, three, four, five could reach you in the initial clash.

And then he made cavalry, which had been kind of a construct in

Greek warfare because, you know, it's hot in the Peloponnese and central Greece, Attica, very expensive to have grazing land or you have to have well-watered land for a horse.

But up in Macedonia, it's much colder, it's wetter.

And he had what he called the companion heavy cavalry.

Heavy cavalry means that they didn't just throw a javelin.

or were equipped with a sword, but they too had a cervissa.

And so he he fashioned this military machine like a symphony.

So there was the pikeman, and then there were two boxing gloves on either side, the companion cavalry.

And then behind the phalanx, he had missile troops and javelin throwers.

So when he saw an enemy,

he had a preconceived point where they would pour in.

javelins,

archery, light cavalry might come up, and if they sensed an opening, then the two boxing gloves would come around and try to box in and get behind the phalanx.

And then whatever Fischer had grown, they would send in the Macedonian pikemen and tear it apart.

And it was just devastating.

So when they took over Greece in 338, then Philip dies and Alexander liquidates all of the rival.

And he's king.

And the first thing he does is there's an insurrection.

He goes down to the historic, iconic city of Thebes and he says, give up.

And they said, oh, we don't do that in Greek warfare.

We'll kind of hold out.

And we'll, no, I mean, give up or I'm going to liquidate you.

He said, no, we don't do that.

So what does he do?

And

he has a siege.

He kills 6,000, 6,000 Thebans.

And then he levels the entire city, levels it to the ground.

and enslaves everybody there and it ceases to exist.

I mean, there's archaeological remains from Mycenae.

This is the city of Oedipus, Antigone.

It's out.

And then he goes over to Europe and he says, okay,

I don't want any more revolution in my back.

I'm going over to pay the Persians back for centuries of aggression.

I want to loot

the Persian Empire.

So in a series of four climatic battles and two great sieges,

In the space of about five years, he destroys the Persian Empire.

At Granicus, when he crosses the Aegean, he crosses the

Gardenales, the Hellespont.

He defeats a Persian army.

He meets the king himself the next year at the Battle of Isis, two years later at 331 up in Guagamela, which is,

you can go there today in Iraq.

I went there.

It's

Urbel.

He destroyed the huge army of the Persian Empire.

That was the third battle.

And at that point, the Persian hierarchy flees, and the entire empire is crumbling.

On the way,

in this circular route into the Middle East, he goes into Tyre,

and everybody thought that city, Tyrrhenian, we get this Phoenician city was impregnable.

And he builds a mole and he takes it and he just wipes out everybody.

He does the same thing with Gaza.

In this period of four battles, he kills over 200,000 Persians in battle, and he kills over 40,000 Greeks,

and he probably kills another 100,000.

And then it gets interesting because

as the empire crumbles, it reverts to its pre-imperial status with local chieftains and strongmen.

So he goes into Bactria, which is modern-day Afghanistan, and it doesn't work too well there as it never works for anybody.

He has it at the Battle of the Hydaspes.

He fights Poros, the Indian lord, and

he defeats him.

He never lost a pitched battle.

He never quit a siege.

But in Afghanistan, it was a dirty war.

And he lost a lot of soldiers, and he just started wiping people out.

It was a Carthaginian peace.

And so in this decade, he has destroyed the Persian Empire.

And all of these treasuries, it was not a market economy.

They were taxed, all the provinces.

I mean, the Persian Empire went from Egypt all the way up to Scythia and all the way from the Persian Gulf to

Thrace.

So it was the largest empire in the world.

And at places like

modern-day Baghdad

or Ekbata or Susa,

Babylon is modern-day Baghdad.

There were these huge treasuries of stored coins and raw bullion.

And once he looted these things, there was a whole trail of Greek scientists and merchants and geographers and

military people.

And they followed in his wake and it just created an entire inflated economy, monetary economy.

And then Greeks that had opposed him flocked to him.

And then at the age of 33, he died, probably from either an old wound or from alcoholism or from malaria.

But before he died, he took this wonderful army back from Afghanistan, Punjab border, and he went all the way through the Gadrosian desert and almost ruined the army.

What I'm getting at is

he was a very brilliant propagandist because when we were doing all of this,

He was doing all of this, destroying the Greek city-states in the sense of there's no more freedom really after Alexander and destroying the Persian Empire.

He did it all for us.

He used this word ecominical, voikomene in Greek, and he said, I'm doing this for the brotherhood of man.

I'm going to have all my soldiers marry Iranian women.

I'm going to bring the races together.

And if it's going to be wonderful, but if you don't like it, I'm going to kill you.

And a lot of people didn't like it.

So he murdered Philotis,

close friend.

He murdered Cletus, close friend.

He even murdered Parmenio.

He wiped out almost everybody.

And

he got paranoid.

And so today,

one of the problems is we don't have a Herodotus or a Thucydides or Xenophon chronicling all this.

And there is two traditions

that survive

into extant historian.

So if you want to read about all this, you have to read either Plutarch's Life of Alexander,

or you have to read a much later

historian in the Clerarchus who's in

fragmentary,

or you've got to read

what exists of the diaries of Ptolemy.

And

they are mostly, not all, but in the famous account of Arian.

And there's a good and a bad tradition, obviously, whether, and, you know, he murdered the philosopher Callisthenes, who was in the bad tradition, and Parmenio was more or less in the good.

And so when you read Arian or Diodorus or Plutarch or Curtius Rufus, those are the four main sources, Curtius, as I said, Alexander, Plutarch, and Arian.

you get very different views of him.

And today, it's split.

And so I'll give you an example of what I meant.

I wrote an article once in 1998.

It was called Alexander the Killer, the Killer.

And so, it was for the Military History Quarterly.

It was a very wonderful journal by Robert Cowley that he had created.

And

I said, let's just count up the people he killed.

So, as I did just now, I went through all the pitch battles, all the sieges, and all of the murders and

kind of genocides that he

did after he burned down Babylon and Persepolis.

I should say burned down Babylon.

He looted it and he burned down Persepolis.

And it's in the many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

And the whole point was he went there to loot.

that kingdom and to get fabulously rich with a bunch of about 20,000 hardcore aristocratic

Macedonians.

And when he died, they wanted to know what to do with it all.

He said, to the strongest.

And so you had Seleucus and you had Ptolemy and you had Antigonus and Attila.

And they just fought for 20 years until they carved out the Seleucid Empire and with Antipater and Cassander.

Then there was a Macedonian Empire in Greece and there was the Ptolemies.

But it was kind of a mess, but it was the beginning of what we call the Hellenistic world.

It was Greek-like, but it didn't have the values of Greece.

But they spoke Greek, they had Greek science, they had a lot of money after looting the East.

And it's the first, you know, it's the second iteration of East-West after the Persian Wars.

Then this is Alexander's payback.

But when I wrote that article and,

you know, I could not believe the reaction, Sammy.

Why did they not like to?

Oh, I had people from the Greek government.

How dare you?

I had people I've known my whole life said, oh, you serious?

There was a professor, I'll be blunt about it.

He's now passed away.

I liked him a great deal, Harry Costis.

He was a Cal State University business professor, but he was also a Phil Hillean, and we were very close.

And

he used to ask me for some favors about when I was in the Department of Foreign Languages.

I think he wanted somebody to take a foreign language exam in Modern Greek, which we didn't offer.

And I didn't speak very well, but I was willing to give the exam so this person could get out of the foreign language.

I did stuff like that.

We were good.

When I wrote that, he went ballistic.

He wrote letters to the Fresno Bee.

Every time I saw him, he would come up to me and start yelling at the top of his voice.

After he passed away, members of his family continued to attack me for 20 years.

They wrote letters to the paper.

How dare you say anything about Alexander the Great?

Part of it was that with the breakup of the former yugoslavia

a serbian element the kosovar near not the kosovar but in macedonia and that was the eastern part of the ancient macedonia they declared their autonomy and even though they were not hellenic speaking and not hellenic people they declared themselves macedonian and that was the same name as the northern province of modern greece macedon macedonia and there was a horrible fight about that how dare these people expropriate our legacy?

But it was very funny because when I was in Greece in 73

during the dictatorship, nobody, when you mentioned Macedonia, and it was kind of like, well, you know, they're kind of Greek, but they weren't really Greek.

They didn't really speak Greek.

They didn't have blonde hair and blue eyes like we do.

All of these weird

ethnic arguments.

And then, of course,

they found the Imperial Trove at Vergyna in 1972,

1973, 4, and they were spectacular,

the royal burials and archives, perhaps even Philip II, at Pella and Vergyna, and it became world famous.

It was so impressive, the treasure trove.

And everybody, you know, at the Getty and all the major museums of the world had tours, the gold of Alexander, searching for Alexander the Great.

Books came out, biographies, and all of a sudden,

the government in Athens changed their view entirely.

All of a sudden, he was as Greek as Greek could be, and Macedon was part of Greece always.

And

there was no difference between Macedonians.

And how dare these former Serbian people, Yugoslavian people, dare expropriate our cultural legacy?

It got to the EU point where one of the conditions of admitting Macedonia to the EU, they had to distinguish themselves from the Greek state of Macedon.

But it just shows you how controversial he was, much more so than assessments of even Caesar or Napoleon.

And so

when I actually counted up, and I wasn't doing it, and I remember in the article, I haven't read it in years, but I did say I don't approve of applying the standards of the present to condemn people in the past.

But that being said, there are moral standards that trans,

you know,

that transcend space and time.

So given the morals of the time was slaughtering every Greek citizen in Thebes who gave up, 8,000 of them, and then enslaving 30,000 and then taking all their land and destroying the city and farming it out to the rest of the Boeotians, or killing everybody in Gaza, or killing everybody in Tyre, or wiping out 40,000 Greek mercenaries, either putting them in chains and selling them into slavery, or killing them right there on the battlefield, or wiping out whole cities in Bactria.

I mean, that was beyond the pale.

The Greeks had never seen anything like that.

When the Thebans revolted against Alexander the Great, it was like, okay, we're going to make a point.

Hey, everybody.

Hey, Athens.

Demosthenes are going to help us.

Hey, Sparta.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great.

You guys almost beat the Macedonians.

And then all of a sudden, he comes down in, you know, in seven days, he comes all the way down from northern Macedon.

And the Spartans and the Corinthians and the Athenians said, not me.

I'm not getting into this.

This guy is, this young guy is a psychopath, and I don't want anything to do with it.

And so he gives them terms, and then

he basically says, oh, I lost 500 of my best soldiers trying to take your city.

So I'm going to wipe out all the males and enslave all the women and children and then level it.

But you know what?

Because I'm such a intellectual and lover of the arts, I'm going to save the house of the poet Pindar.

So that's what he did.

Wow.

You know, I was, I had a whole bunch of questions and you've answered a lot of them, but one of them was, and you've kind of touched on it, but I was wondering maybe directly, what do you think inspired him to go on this rampage of conquest?

I mean, you just said, you know, somebody might look at him and say, I'm not going to, you know, confront this psychopath.

But do you think he was,

what do you think it was?

I mean, it's kind of fascinating because you could ask the same question about George Patton or Steve Jobs or any of these people that just like.

If you read the good tradition and you can find elements of

Ptolemy and Critobolus, these are lost authors and they survive again in Arian and Curtius, Plutarch, and Diodorus.

And they are emphasizing very famous histories.

The most famous history was W.W.

Tarn, Alexander the Great,

written in the early 20th century, and then a very brilliant German scholar that's been translated, Wilkin, History of Alexander the Great.

He was a romantic, and he thought, you know what, let's heal the wounds.

So I will go over there and I will liberate people from autocratic, backward Persian monarchy, and I will give them Hellenism.

And then I will take the Greeks and the Persians and meld them into one globalized vision.

It was very globalist.

Cosmopolitan was a word that he used for

the city of the world.

And he had an

inscription that he put up about the brotherhood of man.

We're all going to have the same gods.

We're going to marry.

We're going to be interracial.

That's if you believe the good tradition.

If you believe the more negative contemporary tradition that also survives in these extant four authors.

And by the way, they're much later.

They're from the Roman period.

So you've got a 300-year hiatus of actual contemporary accounts.

Then he was a thug.

And he, under the guise of

uniting, conquering all the Greeks, he did 1,500 city-states he conquered in three years.

But

he created something that his father had done, the League of Corinth.

It was a puppet, kind of like a Hitlerian group, you know, during the occupation, a Vichy group, I should say.

And he said, don't get mad at me.

I'm going to make you richer than you've ever been.

I need you to come over in my crusade.

Now, a lot, as I said, said, screw you.

I'm going to go there and fight against you to free my

city-state back home.

And there were 40,000 Greeks

that went over there.

I could say something that would be infuriate Philhellenes, and I'm a Philhellene.

He killed more Greeks

than the Greeks did in this period.

Wow.

I mean, all the interstate, I'll put it even more, he probably killed more Greeks than all the Greeks that died in the Peloponnesian War.

So he was, but I think the true, I don't think his father was going to do that.

I think his father was going to go along the coast of what is now Turkey and go from, you know, basically Byzantium all the way down to Bodrom, Haliconarsis.

And that was the wealthiest part.

It's ancient Ionia.

And there were cities like Pergamon and Praene.

He was going to loot them, Ephesus, Miletus, just loot them and free them and say, I'm the Brotherhood of Greece and I want a lot of money.

They were very wealthy.

But Alexander had this much more ambitious idea of, and the amount of coin, gold and silver that he brought into the Hellenic world is staggering.

So you can see it when you look at Hellenistic temples or the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

at Athens or the Temple of Apollo at Didyma.

If anybody ever goes to Turkey, it's kind of worth that hard to get temple, Didyma.

I mean, they're huge.

They're at a magnitude you cannot believe.

They're so lavish.

I think I still have a picture where I'm standing between the flutes, the flutes.

I should say the fillets, because they're Ionic order in Didyma.

It's so massive, the column circumference.

And so there was just a level.

staggering level of wealth that was unleashed that had been locked up in these treasuries.

The Persian idea of economics is you suck up the money from the countryside or the tribute, and then you hoard it, and then you're the only one that has power because you have all the gold and silver.

Well, the Hellenic idea was, no, you coin it, and you make an

inflationary, booming economy.

And there's no doubt about it that a level of wealth just really ensued from his conquest, even though he destroyed it, because he destroyed a backward economy, or at least a wealthy hierarchy that had a backward economic way of thinking, which most people in the ancient world did.

But what I'm getting at, just to finish, is that

it tends to be the American view

that's skeptical of the brotherhood of man.

I did it all

for a utopian enterprise.

It's more that

I got a great army from my father.

He created it.

And

it took him 20 years to conquer Greece, but he conquered it.

And then I inherited it.

I inherited the army.

I inherited the generals.

I inherited Greece from him.

And his next step was to go loot

Asia Minor.

And he came close to dying at the Granicus and at Isis.

So it wasn't, it was a near-run thing.

But once he, those first two battles, he destroyed the Persian army.

And then at Guagamela, he ended it.

I should say he weakened it.

And then it was all up for for grabs and he went

megalomaniac.

And so

the Americans, there was a scholar at Harvard.

Everybody's listening probably who knows something about Alexander, Ernst Badian.

He wrote a series.

He didn't write the great biography we all thought he was going to do.

And I spoke at Harvard a couple of times.

He was in the audience.

He's very critical, by the way.

I remember I was speaking on the other Greeks, and he didn't like the idea of studying agrarianism in the ancient world, but he wrote some very skeptical articles about Alexander the Great, saying he was ruthless and self-centered, selfish, murderous.

And then Peter Green, whom I've also,

anybody wants to go read, Who Killed Homer,

the reply to Who Killed Homer, I wrote with John Heath, I think a 5,000-word rebuttal to him that he attacked our book.

But he did write a history of Alexander the Great that was very critical as well.

And then there was a very scholarly edition by a man named Bosworth in Britain.

And it was, it

basically summed up his career as one of routine, wreckage, and death.

Yeah.

There's been other things that, you know, that there's been, it's kind of like Napoleon.

It's a, it's a whole industry that he's an alcoholic, he was an alcoholic, that he was insane.

He was bipolar.

Who knows?

Yeah.

What were his particular talents on the battlefield or in command?

Do you think that's a quick

caesarean Keller Tos?

So he could look at a battlefield and he was always outnumbered.

He never brought to the battlefield more than 35,000 or 40,000 people at most.

Maybe 18 at Granicus.

But the enemy usually had 60 to 70 to 80,000.

He was sometimes two to one, but he would look at the battlefield.

And then he had these old guys that were his dad's masters, people

like Antimachus and

Antipater and Arminio, especially.

And he'd get together and he'd look at the battlefield and say,

there is the king, usually in the middle in the back.

And we've got to open a fissure where we can get to him.

So I'm going to saturate that point with

artillery in the sense of javelin throwers or send the light cavalry, send the archers.

the javelin

and then once that fissure gets up i'm going to widen it but i'm going to take the heavy cavalry, 2,500 men, maybe on each side, and they had

armor, breastplates, and shorter pikes, javelins, excuse me, spears.

And they went around the blasted through the Persian cavalry, which were lighter.

They had kind of wicker shields and

they didn't have the same type of metallic breasts, and they just plowed right through them.

And they were not heavy.

Heavy cavalry in the ancient world is you have a spear rather than javelin, basically, an armor.

And he got to the back of the Persian army, and he would have been wiped out because it was 2,500

amid thousands.

And at that critical point, the signal was given for the

Macedonian phalanx to advance loxane.

That's a Greek word for obliquely.

And they would just go right to a particular point and blast it wide open.

And then he would be in the back and widen it and try to kill the king or drive him off the field.

So, I guess what I'm saying is 50 to 60 percent of the Persian army never engaged.

It was so quick.

Yeah.

And you didn't want, I mean, there had to be, in any given battle, there was about 10,000 Persians if they centered on you, you're going to be dead.

And the question is, would you hold out long enough so that the other people could regroup or reformulate and outnumber him?

And the answer was always no.

It was so quick.

And he led, he, I mean, he was amazingly brave.

He led every charge himself.

He was almost killed.

You can really see that famous,

it was a famous painting, and most Greek paintings

have been lost,

but they survived in the Roman era, that one at Pompeii where there's Darius in his chariot.

Remember that mosaic?

It's a

mosaic.

Yeah.

And Alexander's trying to get close to him.

Yeah.

He never killed him.

He was executed by a disloyal Persian subordinate, which Alexander, you know, got very angry about.

But

anyway, he's a romantic figure for a lot of people that have, that believe the saga that he was an ecominicalist, globalist,

and it was all for the brotherhood of man.

I tend to be a little bit more cynical and count of the bodies.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we better take a break and come back for our last segment here.

And we're going to look at the 1993 bombing of the the World Trade Center.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back, Victor.

So, it's almost the 30th anniversary of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on our war on terrorism.

We don't really hear too much about it these days.

So, I was wondering if you had anything to reflect on on that.

Well, you remember that 93 bombing was designed

to do what happened in 2001.

It was in the parking lot, as I remember, the garage.

And

it did some damage, but not very much damage.

It didn't take down the building.

And they realized very quickly the way that the way not to take those buildings down was not from the bottom.

It was from mid-level, the way they were built.

Remember, they weren't structurally built like the Empire State Building.

They were built kind of like

a large corridor, vertical corridor with cement slabs for each floor, but without internal reinforcement.

In other words, once one started to fall

where it was hit and the girder started to melt, then it would fall down to the next one and add weight to the next one.

And you had three floors on one, then four floors on one.

And then it would just

collapse.

They didn't know that, but they knew that you couldn't do that again because it did fail.

But the point, Andrew McCarthy

from National Review now was a federal attorney then.

Remember, he prosecuted the so-called blind sheik, who's now, I think he died about five years ago, but he was the architect of it.

And then Khaliq Sheikh Mohammed,

who was kind of the architect of later, you know, he was the one that supposedly was going to have, I don't know, eight or nine

9-11s all at once all over the world involving Americans.

But he was also an architect of 9-11.

He didn't participate directly in it, but he was in Guantanamo.

I don't know if he's still in Guantanamo or not.

And then there was Ramsey Youssef, who was actually one of the perpetrators.

And we found them.

And

one of the things that was strange about it is that

when

it was really the first assault on the American homeland in force, and we didn't, we kind of, you know, I guess the attitude was, well, if they

if they can't even do this, they did, they had a free hand, they did it, and our buildings are invulnerable.

They're not going to be able to do it.

We didn't take it seriously.

It was, you know, it was during the

Clinton administration had just come into power and they had a different idea about terrorism.

Remember, they were offered bin Laden

and they didn't take him.

And then in addition to that, it came it popped up later during the

2000,

10 years later, the discussion about whether to go into Iraq or not.

Everybody thinks it was weapons of mass destruction.

That was what the Bush administration, unfortunately and unwisely, emphasized.

And I had a meeting once.

I was at the Naval.

Academy teaching.

They brought some historians in to talk to members of the administration.

I can't disclose it, but I would just say that when it came to me, I suggested very politely, because there were some very powerful people there, there were 23 writs that the United Nations had given on a platter to the United States,

you know, excuse me, the U.S.

Congress.

They had been also delivered to the United Nations.

The United Nations had not approved them because of Mr.

Villippon.

But the point I'm getting at is that the U.S.

Congress, Democrats and Republicans, had ratified the use of, authorized, the use of force against Saddam.

And they gave 23 reasons why.

And WMD was only one or maybe two reasons.

It was all there.

They had violated the no-fly zones.

They had practiced genocide against the Kurds.

They had murdered and destroyed the culture of the Marsh Arabs.

They had given bounties to suicide bombers

on the West Bank.

And one of them was, they were harboring world terrorists, Abu Nadal.

Remember that name?

He was the bin Laden of an earlier generation.

But also, there had been people involved in the first world trades that had fled.

And so one of the writs why we were going to supposedly clean house after 9-11, we were going to get the guy, all the people who did the 93 bombing.

And so I think everybody, if you just go online sometime, look at U.S.

Congress authorization of force to use against Iraq.

And I think you'll be surprised how many reasons they had.

They're violating U.N.

sanctions, UN charters, et cetera, et cetera.

They were all there.

And I don't know why they did that.

But

when Colin Powell went to the United Nations, remember, and he just, it wasn't a very good presentation, I didn't think.

And then

they kept talking about WMD, WMD, WMD, and in that inter

that period between, say, October of 2002 and the actual invasion in March of 2003, he had plenty of time, if there were the levels, the arsenal and the depot of WMD to truck it to Syria, which some people claim actually he did do.

I don't know if he did or not, but the point I'm making is: had the Bush administration just said, look,

9-11 has changed the world.

And

we want to go through the we want to do this legitimately and legally and lawfully.

But Saddam Hussein is harboring most of the world's terrorists.

He's sponsoring terrorism on the West Bank.

He's giving bounties.

He's committed genocide.

He's broken all of the armistice agreements.

of the 91 war.

He's violated UN sanctions.

He's violated UN rules about no-fly zones.

He's harboring

people who have murdered Americans.

And he's been offered,

he's been threatened that he has to give these things.

He will not comply.

So we are going to take him out.

We're not going to rebuild the country.

We're not going to stay there for 10 years.

We're just going to go in and we're going to take him out.

And we'll hope something better follows.

But if it doesn't, that's what.

I think they would have been all right.

But instead,

they ignored the 23, including the 93 world bombing, and they just fixated was WMD, WMD, WMD, WMD.

And we finally got to that ridiculous thing where Colin Powell had metal cylinders, and we were supposed to think that

there was going to be a bomb developed.

Of course, we knew that that wasn't true because during the Iran-Iraq war of

19, was it 1980?

Israel took out Saddam's reactor, but he was supposedly trying to get it, or Libya was trying to get it.

But it was just too bad that they just got crazy.

And when people say Bush lied, thousands died,

he didn't lie about WMD.

He just listened to the intelligence, or the intelligence listened to him in a circular fashion.

And they just said, you know, oh, yeah, it's a slam dunk.

CIA said that.

But if he just had just forgot WMD, if he had even said,

we think he's got gassed because we know that he's gassed the Kurds.

He did that after the 91 war.

We know that those depots are still there.

But it doesn't pose an existential threat to the United States, at least in terms of weapons of mass destruction.

But he does pose a threat to the entire idea of the post-war order.

And he will go into Kuwait again like he's attacked Iran.

He's attacked Kuwait.

He's attacked Americans.

His people that he's now harboring have attacked us in the 90

and then listed all of the things that Congress

said.

I mean,

there were a lot of liberal Democrats, and there was a majority of Democrats, I think,

in the House that voted for it.

Maybe not the Senate, but a lot of Democrats did vote for it, but not a majority of Democrats.

It was overwhelming in the House.

And it was so funny to see them all go on record,

so many of them go on record to authorize the war.

And then, when they took the statue down in three weeks in that brilliant campaign, do you remember they were all on TV saying, I authorize this war?

I kind of showed that the Democratic Party can be tough on terrorism and it's for strong defense.

And we were very fundamental in giving George Bush the tools that he needed.

And then by July, when we didn't put down the insurrection, it was, I didn't want to, you know, they were, I was misled.

He lied, he lied, he's a liar.

I voted because we were in danger of WMD.

I thought, no, you didn't.

You voted on 23 reasons.

Don't lie to us.

That's crazy.

That destroyed the Republican Party in the 2006 midterm.

And then it gave us Barack Obama.

Do you think that we don't hear too much about the,

you know, we're just not, there's no stories, et cetera, about war on terrorism, Middle East, et cetera, because in the last decade, our military took out a lot of the heads of those cells.

That is the great unknown.

That's non-spoken.

I was embedded twice in the Iraq war.

I went over in 2006 with a group of people.

It wasn't really embedded.

We were in a Blackhawk helicopter that flew over the battlefields,

battle zones, you know.

But then I went back in 2007.

And I was in Humvee and went on a tour with H.R.

McMaster and his group that was assessing the surge.

And I talked to a lot of people.

And I mean, we went to a lot of really kind of hairy places, and there was combat.

But one of the things I wanted to ask was,

and I asked colonels and lieutenant colonels and generals.

I met everybody.

I talked to David Petraeus.

I talked to

most of the people there.

And what I was curious of is the surge, the surge, the surge.

I just didn't believe that 30,000 troops could change the entire complexion of, you know what I I mean, of a battlefield.

So what I discovered, and I think most people who are over there discovered, is under the guise of sending 30,000 troops and under the guise

of

building parks, you'd go over there and then the military command would always want to say, look at this.

we built a park in Baghdad or look at this, we paved this road.

Or I remember I went to

a generator, a big generating plant, and I was told that the transformers and the electrical stuff was more sophisticated than in the United States.

Think of that.

And they were bragging all the money, trillion dollars we were spending.

But under the cover of all that, they were killing people like they've never killed them.

I think Stanley McChrystal was in charge of a lot of killer teams.

So then you talk to other people.

off the record and they'd say, yeah, the search helps.

Yeah, that's good.

Yeah, we're winning winning hearts and minds.

Yeah, fish have to swim in water.

So we're the fish.

We were changing the complexion of the water, but don't believe all of that.

Under all of that utopian rhetoric, we just took the gloves off.

And we've got the names of almost every Baathist and Al-Qaeda sympathizer, and we're just killing them.

We're killing them day and night.

And then when we did that, then it settled down.

So when Obama came,

if you look at the deaths per year of Americans in 2009,

it's less than the accident rate.

So then he pulled out.

I don't know why.

He came in.

When he entered office, the war was won and there was a viable government, but he just yanked it out.

And then they just panicked.

ISIS took over.

But then Donald Trump,

he didn't talk, he said, I'm going to bomb the SHI.

He did.

He just.

They went right back and they just unloaded on ISIS from the air.

And it was pretty tough.

You talk to people that were over there and they just

tell you that they got the coordinates and they just blanket area bombed them.

And so, yeah, I think if you add 20 years in Afghanistan and you add

the Iraq war, at least how it was conducted from

late 2006 to 2008, and then you look at the Trump bombing attack on ISIS, I would say that they killed a lot of terrorists.

And more importantly, they gave the sense that they didn't care.

They would, we were willing to react.

I can't answer the question whether all of that was worth,

because we talked about

Mark Mori and I talked about that.

Same thing was true of Vietnam.

It takes Americans a long time to know what they're doing, you know.

And it took us from 2003 until 2006 and 2007 to know what we were doing.

And we lost so many good people over there.

I don't know if the whole enterprise was worth it.

If you had it to do over, you could probably have neutralized them with bombing attacks from, you know, missile, cruise missiles.

But

I don't know if getting rid of Saddam Hussein saved a lot of lives.

He was a murderous guy who'd probably killed a half a million people in his reign, whether they were Kurds or Marsh Arabs or people who were sent into Iran as cannon fodder.

But anyway,

I think that there's something to that.

If that is true, you've got to remember that the antithesis is true too,

that the last two years, we have basically crawled on our hands and knees over to Tehran and said, please, please, would you please, would you please let us get back into the Iran deal?

I know that John Kerry broke our Logan Act, such as it is, and he's been talking to you during the Trump years, but he's, we're ready to give you what you want.

And the Iranians looked at that and they said, these people would never kill solemni.

These people want this deal so bad.

And they said, screw you.

They not only said, screw you, they said, you know what?

We're going to kill Pompeo, and we're going to kill Trump, and we're going to kill members of the high command that were involved in that Solomoni assassination.

To this day,

I think people like Mike Pompeo have over a million dollar cost for security because those threats are real.

They've arrested people in Boston that were on assassination.

So what I'm getting at is we lost deterrence.

And when you go over to Israel and Trump had completely cut off the Palestinians, there was no terror.

He had basically said to Israel, if they attack you,

if they attack you, take the gloves off and we're not going to give them a penny.

And then he'd gone, you know, to the Arab world and said, you know what?

Iran is your enemy.

It's our enemy.

It's Israel's enemy.

And the Palestinians,

you guys have a lot of money.

Just give them the money and have something.

But they're never going to destroy Israel and push it into the, from the river to the sea.

That's crazy.

And it was all, everybody agreed on that.

And you know what?

There was not very much terrorism whatsoever during the Trump period.

And then when Biden came in, oh, let's give.

the $400 to $800 million, whatever it was, back to the Palestinians.

And let's say that Israel is culpable.

And you know what?

Let's beg the Iranians to have a deal.

And let's say that the Saudis are backward, horrible people.

We don't want anything to do with them.

And at the same time, we're going to do that, we're going to be really weak and say, please, please, pump more oil.

We have a midterm coming up.

Gas is $5 a gallon.

Can you get OPEC and you, Saudis?

And they had nothing but contempt for her.

So it's a very dangerous period right now.

I mean, you look at the Afghan sand pullout, the way that was done.

And yeah, I think we're going to be into another cycle of Islamic terrorism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we are at the end of the show and it's been, you know, we've gone much longer than, but I feel that you, our listeners, and I all feel that it was all too short.

So, thank you very much for all your discussion, Alexander, and also this last on the war on terror as it's going on.

And we don't see it these days, but

thanks.

We very much appreciate it.

Well, I hope you

covered a lot of territory.

I think it's kind of good to mix history with contemporary affairs.

I know that some people don't want to hear about Alexander Great.

Next time,

we're going to talk about the Punic Wars.

Sounds good.

Yeah, two Punic Wars, and the third is a siege.

And I am going to, I'm still drinking my Elevate water.

I think you should all try it.

I'm not giving a plug.

That's what keeps me.

But the website is drink elevate.com, so anybody can go to that.

I really like it.

I really do.

I've never had water.

I have a problem with no moisture in my mouth, dryness.

Yeah.

Some histamine problem.

But man, it really is something that gives me energy and and lubricates your mouth so you talk talk like a motor mouth and two other things I think your listeners would be interested in is we just or you just did an interview with Mark Moyer on Vietnam and that was a Friday your Friday show and you are going to do a follow-up interview with Dr.

Kway on COVID.

I am.

We had a lot of requests for that because if you remember that, Stephen Kway,

when it was very unpopular to even suggest, he went into detail to our listeners about the genetic sequence.

And he said some things that were quite extraordinary that the chances were in the many millions that that exact, very infectious, very effective virus could have been naturally occurring.

And he got a lot of static.

So he contacted me the other day, and we're going to have him back on right away.

We also are going to have Cleta Mitchell.

She was,

you've seen her on Fox News.

She's been trying to rally Republicans to beware of electioneering and ballot fraud.

And

she's been a crusader and she's going to be on.

She's wonderful and she knows inside and out how the left has tried to call people various names, smear them as a deterrent from them.

conducting a fair election.

We're supposed to be so afraid and so odd that they don't like us and they think that we don't want to be called names.

Go ahead and you don't need an ID.

You don't, you know, that kind of stuff.

She's an expert on the mentality of the left's aversion.

And finally, this month, we're going to have Roger Kimball.

You know him.

He writes four or five columns a week.

He's the editor of Encounter Books.

He's the editor of the New Criterion.

He's probably, he's the famous editor, author, excuse me, of Tenured Radicals.

It was the first expose of the left-wing takeover of of the university.

That was 30 years ago.

So he's going to be wonderful.

So we're going to have some good interviews coming up.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, and thanks to the audience for listening.

And we'll see you next time.

Yeah, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson.

We're signing off.