The Culturalist: Battles Lost to the Strong

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Culturalist.

The Culturalist is dedicated to a look at the past events and individuals and their reflection in the current events.

Today we'll be looking at the Sicilian expedition in ancient Greece in 415 BC, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in early 1968 for the first two months.

And then we're going to talk a little bit about Afghanistan and our pullout in Afghanistan today.

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I'm Sammy Wink,

and I am lucky enough to be able to talk with Victor today about the Sicilian expedition, or as Victor calls it, the Sicilian nightmare.

and then Vietnam and then Afghanistan.

So if you don't mind, Victor, we'll go straight into the material because we only have limited time here.

In your book, A War Like No Other, where you look at the entire Peloponnesian War and you treat it bitopically, and in the topic of cavalry, you talk about the Sicilian expedition.

And I think our listeners know that the Sicilian expedition was probably the beginning of the end of the Peloponnesian War for the Athenians.

But we would like your account of what happened to the Athenian Empire and the Athenian military at this point and really its significance historically.

When the Athenians attacked Sicily, which was the largest, larger city than Athens, democracy in the world, it ostensibly didn't make any sense because Athens was a democracy at war with a Spartan oligarchy.

In some ways, it would be as if the United States was mired in Iraq, say, in 2005, and decided to go all the way to India and attack India.

So it didn't make any sense.

The war went from 431 to 404 BC, but remember in 421 it reached a stalemate after 10 years of hard fighting in which the elephant of land forces, Sparta, felt that it could not beat the whale of naval forces.

In other words, both sides agreed, tacitly, subtext of their agreement, was that Sparta would have to develop a navy to defeat Athens, or Athens would have to beat Sparta on on land.

And they tried that during the Cold War from 421 to 416 at Mantine, and it failed.

They had organized a coalition of which Alcibiades was the architect, although the Athens didn't send sufficient troops to the alliance that they might have won.

And Sparta had tried to enlist the Corinthians and to get maybe the Sicilians and others with sea power to counteract Athens, and it failed.

So here we are at a stalemate, a Cold War.

And suddenly, in the year 415, Athens, the radical democracy, thought, well, if the war is stalemated, but they're still hostile to us, then we have to break the strategic calculus.

And that means, why don't we go 700 miles to the other ends of the earth?

That means if you're in Athens, remember there's no Corinth canal.

So you've got to sail all the way around the Peloponnese, and then you can't go across the Mediterranean very easily in the ancient world.

So you've got to hug the coast of western Greece, and then you get all the way up to near Corfu and then you head across the open sea to Sicily.

It's very dangerous to do.

And they decided that they would come in such numbers, a first wave, and then they would be reinforced of about 30,000 rowers, 200 ships,

8,000 to 10,000 hoplites, 40,000 people, that their sheer preponderance of force would impress the Sicilians and especially scare, terrify the Syracusans, the largest city.

Why did they do it?

Because Syracuse was a Doric ally of Doric Sparta, and they felt that even though the government was more similar to their own, they could take Sicily.

And there was a sense that there was a national madness at Athens.

Little kids were drawing, Plutarch tells us, pictures of Sicily and North Africa in the sand as if this was a stepping stone to a pre-Roman-like Mar nostrum.

The problem was it was inherently flawed, not necessarily by the conception, because after all, they were the world's great sea power, and if they got Sicily and its numerous resources, population, grain, it would be an asset.

But the problem was they had a divided command, a no-no in the history of military affairs, between the rambunctious, young, volatile, gifted Alcibiades.

the old plotting Nicias, unimaginative, but he had the old guard's interest and they trusted him, and then the old war horse Lamachus.

So anytime you have a command that's divided by three generals, it's not going to work.

And then they compounded the idea that they were in factional strife.

And on the eve of the expedition, they accused Alcibiades of impiety, of knocking off the phallic members of the Hermes statues, of desecrating sacred rites.

of Eleusis, et cetera, et cetera.

So no sooner did they land there than there was a call to go arrest Alcibiades.

Think of that.

That would be like saying, We're having General Petraeus reorganize troops in Afghanistan.

Oh, and by the way, we're going to bring him home and try him.

Now, they did do that later, but it was after he was out of Afghanistan.

So, it was very dangerous.

And then we had Nicias, who had kidney stones.

If somebody's been operated on three times, I can tell you that if you have a kidney stone, nothing else is in your mind other than relief.

And there's no codeine or hydrocodone or any of that in the ancient world.

So, this guy's laying on the beach with kidney stones.

And then Lammachus gets killed and Alcibiades gets recalled and the fate of 40,000 men are in the hands of somebody in agony who wasn't very adroit to begin with.

And then the problem is it's very hard to have what they call hippobatae horse transports.

Sicily has wide plains.

Hoplite warfare is in small enclosed plains between heavy infantrymen.

But if you put a hoplite army out in the middle of the plain, it can be harassed and worn down like Crassus at Carai happened later in the Roman late Republic.

And so they almost pull it off.

That is, within a year, they've got the city surrounded by a counterwall.

Nicias is finally making sense throughout his bouts of pain.

The Syracusans are short water and food.

They're just about ready to concede.

And in comes Gallippus with a Spartan-Peloponnesian relief fleet.

And unfortunately for Athens, Sparta had a tradition of having brilliant half-Spartans, bastards, semi-Spartans, mavericks, outlaws that didn't conform to Spartan orthodoxy, which meant in strategic terms they were brilliant.

And we think in the Peloponnesian War of three of them, Brasidas, who was killed at Amphipolis, and then later Lysander that...

defeated the Athenians at sea, and then this Gallippus.

And he is a master tactician and strategist.

He

reinvigorates the defense.

Athens tries a night attack, disaster.

Their second group of reliefs are under the Athenian Demosthenes, not the famous order, but a wildly imaginative but erratic general.

He tries this night attack.

It fails.

And then they just try to weigh everything in a great sea battle.

We have a great description in the historian Thucydides, and he tells us that During this battle, it goes back and forth.

People are yelling, we won, we lost, we won, we lost, as they look at different parts of the battle.

And when it's over, essentially, the Athenian fleet is almost destroyed.

And that means these people have no way home.

And they decide to walk, march across the island to a friendly city and find succor there.

And then this is the tragedy of Book 7 in Thucydides.

It's hot.

They have no water.

They fight each other in the mud to drink and they're harassed.

And when it's all over, who is left is imprisoned in the rock quarries.

You can see those today on Syracuse.

Nicias is executed.

The whole entire fleet is destroyed.

Athens only has a few triremes left.

These are imperial Athenian troops.

That means they're not all Athenian.

They're Athenian allies too.

But 40,000 of them Thucydides says doesn't come home.

The greatest defeat in the classical Greek world up to that time, although we think maybe six or seven thousand were taken prisoner and some found their way home.

They come up in later forensic literature.

But the point is that after that, Athens cannot win the Peloponnesian War.

But it doesn't necessarily mean it can lose.

They quickly build a fleet and under a series of gifted commanders, they start to win again.

And they win a series of important sea battles until they lose a big one at Aegas Potabay and they lose a war.

But they last for nine years.

And what's stunning about this is

Everybody thinks it's a bad idea.

Don't divide the command.

Don't go 700 miles when you're in a Cold War with Sparta.

Don't go to a city and an environment and a geography that favors horse when you have to bring your own horses, etc.

And there are allies in Sicily

that suggested they were not honest people.

They tricked them into sending them help.

That said, Thucydides said they could have won the war had they had support from home.

I don't know what that means because, as I pointed out in The War Like No Other, they gave all the material support that you can imagine.

They drained the city on two occasions to send triremes and hoplites.

But I guess what he meant was that if they'd had support and not indicted their most gifted of the three generals, Alcibiades, and maybe had backed him up or maybe had not fought over the wisdom once you've committed, kind of reminds me of Matthew Ridgway's advice to a series of American presidents.

The only thing worse than getting into a bad war is losing it.

So that is the model of what not to do for a democracy.

And that description in book six of the debates in the Athenian Assembly are the classic critique of radical democracy.

And ever since that scene in Thucydides, along with Plato's description and the apology of Socrates, perhaps Aemilian dialogues, a Mytilenean debate, or the stasis of people have not had a positive view of democracy.

Yeah.

Can I just ask you, if you're one of the dead on the battlefield, what would you blame for the war itself?

I know you gave us sort of Thucydides kind of vague statement there, but in your estimation, who, what, or would one blame for that defeat?

For the expedition?

Yeah, or well, for the expedition, for the...

Well, the person who, I think most of the great historians of classical Greece, writing in German, Bailok or Busolt

or Edward Meyer, but especially Berry in English and George Groat, these are all 19th century giants of Greek historiography.

They felt that Nicias' indecision.

And by that, they meant when it was a key point:

should we risk everything fighting the sea battle, or should we march, or should we not march?

He either conducted religious rites or said the phases of the moon were not correct, but he hesitated.

Hesitated.

Remember what Napoleon said: if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

If you want to go to Sicily, and of the three generals, they get there in 415 and they find out there is no gold, there are no allies, there is no open revolt, it's all a lie, and it's just Syracuse versus them.

And

Lamachus says, the guy that's supposed to be on the magic, okay, go straight to the capital now, because every day that we don't, we're going to get weak and they're going to get stronger.

And Alcibiades says, well, maybe first we should circle the island, show this huge, beautiful army, and then people will enlist.

And Nicaeus is sort of, well, maybe we should go home, or maybe we shouldn't go home, or I don't know.

It's kind of depressing.

And that's what the usual critique is.

They had one brilliant but erratic commander, and the one person who they didn't expect to have the right strategy got killed.

And then the worst of the three ended up in command.

Yeah, so that brilliant, yeah, that brilliant commander.

I have one more question about this that I've often wondered.

So Alcibiades had such a promising thing to him.

What happened?

Why was his career so

he appears all over Greek?

Remember that he appears all over Greek literature.

And by that I mean he's in Plato's Symposium, he's in Thucydides' history, Aristophanes refers to him, and Xenophon talks about him, especially at Aegos Potomy.

The problem is, as Aristophanes says, if you're going to raise a lion, then use him.

But don't raise a lion and let him turn on you or cast him out.

So he joined the Spartans and basically gave away the plan of Sicily and told them to go intervene.

Had they not ostracized him, or they didn't really technically do that, but if they had not exiled him or threatened to kill him or put him on trial, then I doubt the Spartans would have intervened.

And so his classic diagnosis of Alcibiades is he was a third generation Athenian.

That is, he grew up with all the splendor and wealth and affluence of democracy, but he lacked the first generation's ordeal at Marathon or Salamis.

And he didn't have the vision and grandeur of the second generation's Periclean visions, but he just had all of the downside, but none of the upside.

Spoiled, good-looking.

We're told that he dressed in lavish.

He was sort of like Donald Trump in the sense that he did things to excess, but he was also talented, and nobody knew quite what to do with him.

And finally, his tragedy is that...

when the final book of the war, remember Thucydides' history trails off in 411.

We don't have from 411 to 404, 403, but we do have it in Xenophon.

And from Xenophon's account, when Alcibiades turns up in his little house or his estate in exile at Aegos Potomy, all the way over to Turkey at the Chersoneses, he says,

hey, you Athenians,

your camp is here and your tribes are there.

And if the Spartans come around the corner, These are the Dardanelles that we remember from Churchill's bad experience in 1915.

You're too far away.

And so that's exactly what happens.

Lysander and the Spartans come around the bend.

They have to run too far to get in their tribes and they're still getting them out to sea when they're attacked and destroyed.

So he gives the right advice, but nobody believes him because he has no credibility given his lifestyle and excesses.

A lot of people have suggested that the tragedy of Alcibiades is the tragedy of Athens.

He's exiled, I think, and recall two time.

All right.

So maybe if we can turn to Vietnam now and to the last chapter in Carnage and Culture you write about the Tet Offensive in early 1968.

And if we could get your account on...

Because it's very strange, the strange thing that is always considered the sort of the beginning of the end of the U.S.

presence in Vietnam.

In January during the lunar new year of 1968, the North Vietnamese under the supposed general and genius Jiao decided to attack, I think it was 13 to 15 cities all at once.

And why did they do that?

Because they looked at the peace, so-called peace, anti-war demonstrations, the unpopularity of the Johnson administration.

and the election year and they said, you know what, we're going to demoralize the Americans.

Americans have been up at Khe Song and contrary to popular fables, if you look at that air battle, the United States absolutely devastated the North Vietnamese.

So the idea was let's go on a sudden counteroffensive during a holiday truce, an understood truce.

And we don't, we'll try to take the war from the north and from

the hills and bring it into Saigon.

and Wei and the major cities.

And we'll kill people on TV.

We'll attack the embassy.

We'll attack department stores.

We'll attack American airfields and tell the American people that their teenage kids that didn't want to go over there are in danger anywhere they are, behind the lines anywhere.

And they did that.

I can remember it very well because I was

a sophomore in high school and I remember reading about it.

And all of a sudden, everybody kept saying Vietnam's turning out like Sicily.

I thought, what does that mean?

So it was the first time I ever read Thucydides.

And I wanted to know what the Sicilian expedition is.

And the idea was, here is the America engaged like Athens was with Sparta in a deadly Cold War with the Soviet Union where there were battlefields all over the world in places as diverse as Cuba and the Middle East.

And why in the world are we going all the way over to Vietnam and fighting in a theater that's not important, not even important like Korea?

That's what the argument was.

And so everybody started to say this is unwinnable and they started quoting Thucydides in selective memory, not, they would never quote Thucydides because in fullness and candor, because he said, he would have said, well, Vietnam would have worked had it got full support from home.

But to make a long story short, when the whole thing was over, it was an utter military disaster for the North Vietnamese.

They lost 40, 40,000 to 50,000 dead.

I think the Americans and all of their Western allies lost.

Koreans lost maybe 4,000 or 5,000.

The Viet Cong was absolutely rendered combat ineffective for about a year.

And once they came out into the open, that's what the Americans had wanted all along.

They were absolutely devastated by superior American firepower.

And so there were two realities.

People were reporting from the battlefield in bits and pieces that, yes, we were surprised.

Yes,

Johnson was lying when he said that victory's in sight.

Victory's right around the corner.

But all that being said,

the Vietnamese have suffered a terrible military defeat.

And the U.S.

Army and Marines have fought brilliantly.

But Walter Conkright came out there and, you know, when Johnson said, if you've lost Conkrite, you've lost the nation.

He was the big anchor for CBS News.

And he said, you know, we have to negotiate.

And then from that point on, the left said, look, we're losing the war because they attacked the U.S.

Embassy.

Can you imagine that?

Well, at that point, had we wanted to invade the North, believe me, we could have gone into the North because they had lost so many troops and they had basically had three whole divisions destroyed and a whole counterinsurgency movement destroyed but we didn't so we felt that it was a psychological disaster and the north vietnamese knew that so then we started on peace talks paris peace talks 1968 violating the cardinal rule of negotiations you never never negotiate after a setback or from perceived weakness.

The irony of the whole thing was the North Vietnamese thought, hmm, we've really been defeated, but for some strange reason, our propaganda is working.

And the Americans think they lost and they won.

So if we lost and we think we won, and they won and think they lost, when this is going to be easy.

And that was their attitude.

And that marked the end of the whole Vietnam project.

It cost Johnson the 1968 election.

It ushered in Vietnamization.

And it was repeated, by the way, in 1971-72 when we cut off all aid and air support for the South Vietnamese.

So after losing over 50,000 dead, North Vietnamese just sort of drove in 1975.

They drove into Saigon on Highway 1 without much worry about U.S.

air support.

We weren't there anymore.

That's another story.

Yeah.

And so how do we account for the two realities, one on the home front and one on the battlefront?

In American life, in American politics,

five letters.

Oh no.

D-R-A-F-T draft.

And I mean, when I was in high school, everybody in high school, and we were only 15 when this was going on, we all thought, hmm, we have a rendezvous, 16, 17.

And then Richard Nixon understood that all of these terrible demonstrations and all over the country, Berkeley, Kent State, Ohio,

all of them were predicated on the draft, that people did not want to go over there and die in Vietnam.

And that was the whole anti-war movement, the 60s music, the whole 60s uprising was predicated on Vietnam.

So Nixon was a brilliant Machiavellian politician.

So he said to himself, for geostrategic reasons and for my strategic agenda of playing Russia off against Mao, China, and winning the Cold War, I'm going to end the draft.

And I'm going to go to a lottery system as an intermediary step to an all-volunteer army.

So I went to UC Santa Cruz as a first year student.

And when I got there, in two weeks, I got my draft number.

It was a lottery number.

And it was like 271, my twin brother and I.

And my father said, do not ever volunteer to go to Vietnam, A, but if you get called, you're going to go.

You're not going to do any of this crap.

So I said, okay.

So we were just waiting around.

And I think they went up to 51 was all.

But no sooner had I got my number and I sort of said, well, I guess I'm not going to be going to Vietnam than they started to tell us it was going to be an all-volunteer army and it was.

So it killed off.

And I mean, that literally, when I got to UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1971, I walked into a brilliant art history class taught by Jasper Rose and Mary Holmes.

It was a wonderful class and there were these little three punks that went in.

Oh, there's people dying in Vietnam and they tried to overturn stuff.

So my point was that in my first year, I saw a radical transformation from arriving at a campus where the draft was vestigially in effect, and then we had the lottery.

But even the people that had in the low 50s were protesting, not a lot, but there was still in 1971 a huge, in the fall, a huge anti-war, and then the Cambodia thing in 1972.

But my gosh, by 1973, it was over, kaput.

Richard Nixon had started to withdraw massive amounts of U.S.

materiel and troops, numbers of troops, and there was a volunteer army.

And it was not anything other than the draft.

And he solved that problem.

He not only solved that, he solved it in the most brilliantly cynical way because the left kept saying, oh, you know what we're going to do?

Just sort of like open borders today.

They're always screwing around the demography.

They said, we're going to get the 18-year-old vote.

If you're old enough to die in Vietnam, then by God, you're old enough to vote.

It's got logic to it.

So everybody in the right said, oh my gosh.

And Nixon didn't.

Nixon thought, okay,

that sounds good, but there won't be a draft.

So you're not going to get scare of Mr.

Smith from Ohio and 18-year-old Tom Jones from Texas that he has to go over there.

And so he won the 18-year-old vote, and he won it in a landslide.

1972 election.

And that was the end of the 60s.

Reagan put the nail on the coffin, but once Americans thought, you know what?

The only people are going to be in that, what they considered a stupid war, are some third generation, fourth generation, white, poor, rural, south of the Mason-Dixon land, family legacy type soldier who feels that it's his duty to go away, and that's fine with me.

There's a lot of myths, and I discussed that in Carnage and Culture.

There was a myth that people of color died inordinately, they did not.

If you look at the population tables based on race versus the fatality rates in Vietnam, and then you add in the component of class, as is true of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The people who inordinately died in Vietnam were white males, usually from the lower middle classes and poor.

And often, I shouldn't say often, but usually south of the Mason-Dixon line and in depressed areas such as southern Ohio, upstate New York, Bakersfield, California, that kind of stuff.

The journalism at the time, it really wasn't reporting the war because it didn't come back with the the Tet Offensive being a military victory for the United States, however strange that sounds.

But the journalists came back with all these horror stories.

And so were they just reflecting this general trend that the draft had created against the war?

Or was there something else that the journal, I mean, they just were bought into the side against the government for some reason?

Or was it just...

It was the first time that we were in the midst of a multifaceted revolution in the United States and by that I mean women's right to vote minority rights civil rights rock music legalization of de facto use of drugs I should say marijuana gay rights and in that menu in that pot paris there was a something called the new journalism it was could be anybody from tom wolf to David Halberstam or any of these people.

And their argument, Tom Wolfe changed, but the argument was that in this revolution, you had to take sides, sort of what the new journalism today says.

And you cannot be unbiased in Vietnam because we wouldn't have been there had you not gulped the so-called government propaganda, the Gulf of Tunkin and all that stuff.

Okay.

So journalists that were in that war felt they had a patriotic duty.

or a careerist duty or a romantic duty or psychological duty.

I don't know what the proper term was, to end it.

So they focused on the death and destruction.

There was a lot of death and destruction.

And that famous picture of a South Vietnamese officer blowing out the brains of a suspect who was in custody.

Nobody ever told you that person had just killed innocent people.

Not that that excuses it.

But there was a context to all of these things.

And Khe Song was a terrible defeat.

No, it wasn't.

The United States withdrew voluntarily after devastating the enemy.

Tet was a horrific defeat, only psychologically or maybe strategically because of news coverage, but not militarily.

So there was a whole story beyond that that people didn't, the media didn't want to hear.

And it made a lot of careers.

If you go back to all of those anchors in the 1990s, Dan Rather, Tom Brokal,

or all of them, they all had their stints in Vietnam.

And that's where they became.

kind of famous.

Gonzo journalists, they were famous.

All right.

So let's then turn to Afghanistan and just look at Afghanistan to apply any of the lessons learned from these earlier events as we withdraw from Afghanistan.

It's really looking really bad there in the terms of Afghan military fighting Taliban actions when they come into these Afghan villages that had been on the U.S.

side.

So it's going to be a bloody withdrawal, or it's already a bloody withdrawal.

But what do you think about Afghanistan and our polling out at at this point?

Well, you have to start with certain premises and

both historical and in our particular case.

And the first is,

if you look at Alexander the Great, who was the first Westerner to go in there and who founded a Seleucid province there.

Westerners, unlike the popular narrative, can go into Afghanistan, they can intermarry with the people, they can settle, but only really on the plains.

They never were able, whether it was the Hellenistic successor kingdom or whether it was a British later, they did not

succeed in pacifying the country.

It's got a warlike tradition.

It's rugged country in the mountains.

We all knew that.

And so when we went into Afghanistan after 9-11, and remember we did it in the fall of 2001,

we knew that.

So here's what we said we were going to do.

We're not going to have a Vietnam.

We're not going to get controversial.

George W.

Bush Bush had about a 70% positive rating, popular.

So he said, we're going to go to the UN.

And the UN authorized the use of force to go get bin Laden, who was up in the mountains on the Pakistani border.

And we went to the Congress and they overwhelmingly, in a bipartisan fashion, authorized the war.

And after some rough spots, in about six weeks, a very, very small force of special forces, CIA contractors, CIA officers, and specialized American troops knocked out the Taliban

and were able to chase bin Laden and his subordinates into the Pakistani border.

And we thought we won.

And then we decided within 2002, we thought we'd won.

And we were going to go into Iraq the next year.

And I guess they thought we were going to go into Syria if Assaw didn't cooperate.

And they were going to reorder the Middle East.

I don't know what happened, but I think you can make the argument in retrospect that the United States is barely capable of maintaining political support for one overseas intervention, but not two.

So immediately the left got angry and wanted to oppose the Iraq war, but did not in the 2004 election or the 2006 election or the 2008 election be castigated as a party that lost Iraq or something.

So what they did is they rebranded Afghanistan as the good war.

And indeed, if you look at casualties up to about 2008, it was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

And Afghanistan was semi-pacified.

So Obama ran on the idea that we were right to go into Afghanistan.

We had UN support, we had congressional support, we won, and I'm going to support Afghanistan.

But Iraq was terrible.

And, you know, I wrote a couple of articles about this and for book chapters and stuff.

And I said, well, if you look at it very carefully, the opposite is true.

that Iraq has a port.

It's in the Persian Gulf, so to speak.

It's got a port.

So that means you can supply people and you can have naval air support.

And it has a sophisticated elite that has to.

It has a petroleum industry.

It's an urban population.

It's highly literate.

And it's in a key area of U.S.

interest at the time, given oil and Israel and whatnot.

Okay, you look at Afghanistan.

It's landlocked.

Landlock.

How are you going to supply it?

It's mountainous, which we don't do good well, we the Americans in jungles and in mountains.

We like flat plains and deserts where firepower can have its fullest lethal expression.

In addition to that, the neighborhood was terrible.

You know, there's Russia and China, but especially Pakistan.

And the Taliban were not former Baptists or Shia militants.

These guys were medieval.

And they had no sense that they ever would want to take over the country in a westernized fashion.

And so it was always going to be much more difficult.

And more importantly, and I think this was really important, we were trying to fight the two wars simultaneously.

And when this was called the good war that was won and it wasn't won, and the bad war that was lost and it wasn't lost.

So Obama really made that distinction.

So after the surge worked and then Obama pulled out all the troops in 2011 and then we had ISIS, et cetera, this thing started to heat up again.

And it was never really pacified.

And then all of a sudden, we got up to 2,300 dead, other 10 to 15,000 wounded in Afghanistan.

The NATO troops were sick of it.

And what do you do?

And then Obama came in and changed the rules of engagement.

All of our commanding officers, there was the CENTCOM James Mathis, was sort of asked, forced to resign or quit.

We don't know what.

And then we had...

General McChrystal, the decorated veteran in Iraq.

He was the commander of the Afghan ground troops.

And he's the Joe Bite me incident, where subordinate made fun of Biden.

And he didn't reprimand him, supposedly.

And then we had David Petraeus, the hero of the surge, and that didn't work well.

So it just went downhill.

And now we were faced with a situation after 20 years.

This is almost like the Peloponnesian War, not quite 27.

You keep 2,000 or 3,000 troops to guard a Bagram air base and have full air support.

It was exactly the situation you talked to us, Mutandas, the necessary changes being made as we were faced in 74, 75 in Vietnam.

So Donald Trump, of all people who ran on we're going to get rid of optional wars that don't pencil out in a cost-to-benefit analysis said we've got to get out of there and he was right but he decided or he was convinced to leave air support and remember he had said in Jacksonian fashion we're going to bomb the SHIT out of ISIS and everybody said he's an isolationist no he's a Jacksonian don't tread on me no better friend no worse enemy and so what he did was he unleashed the Air Force on ISIS and he said you know what, I don't really care about, I'm paraphrasing, I'm being unfair to him, but he basically said, I don't care about collateral damage.

You don't need my permission every time you drop a bomb.

I just want you to bomb the crap out of ISIS and save lives.

And they did.

So that was our policy in Afghanistan on Trump, that we had air support for a largely Afghanized military force.

And it was sustainable.

If you look at the casualty ratios and fatality ratios, it was not nearly as dangerous as Chicago, I can tell you that, per year.

But Biden came in and felt that was an issue that would resonate because people were sick of it.

That's being fair to everybody involved.

I have a great deal of empathy for the U.S.

military who did heroic service there, but they had no strategic communications with the American people.

By that I mean if you ask a four-star general to have a press conference and said, go to it and win the American people over to the Afghanistan project.

They could not, in strategic terms, tell us why it was in our interest.

Yeah, they couldn't say, this right here on the map is likely where bin Laden's successors will form.

This is where they're going to have Pakistani support.

This is where they're going to launch the next terrorist attack, or

these are exactly the areas that we think we can hold.

This has something maybe like South Korea around 1960.

There's potential there that in 20 years

we can have a good ally.

It might be like sort of Afghanistan from 1918 to 1973 before the Soviet revolutions that eventually in 79 brought the Soviets in.

They didn't do any of that.

Nobody ever told us this is the strategic plan for success.

They just said, we need more troops.

We need more troops.

We need more troops.

Why?

You haven't used the ones successfully there.

So there was a strategic and tactical lapse on the part of the U.S.

military.

And maybe in their defense, they were asked to fight two unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it turned out that if you look today, and this is the height of ironies, ironic, ironic, ironic.

If you look at Iraq today and you look at Afghanistan, I think there's more potential in Iraq to be a stable country than there is in Afghanistan.

By that, I mean there is a residual, some type of government that is in some way partially consensual.

And Iran hasn't really overran it quite yet and the United States is welcome in Iraq in part it has a presence there that's not going to be true in Afghanistan that's funny you just went there because I was just going to ask you do you think that this Afghanistan war and the current polling out is shutting the door on this American endeavor to nation build in its geopolitical and instead going in just for purely nationalist reasons if it suits American interests rather than this nation building.

Here was the dialectic before Trump, that there was something called the bipartisan Washington, New York establishment.

And these were the people from the Brookings Institution, AI, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington Post op-ed people, and they can call them neoconservatives or whatever, but they basically said that we were going to have optional preemptory wars.

In the Republicans' case, it was Afghanistan, retaliation, albeit for 9-11, and Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, who make it nuclear weapons or had all these potentials for all this nefarious activity.

And in the case of the Democrats, it was to get rid of Qaddafi, and even though he was sort of handing power off to this next generation, which wasn't so bad.

But we're going to go into Libya, then we're going to go into Syria.

That was kind of nixed by inviting the Soviets in, John Kerry's blunder.

The point I'm making is that was the consensus.

On the left, there was the hardcore anti-war people, and they were against all that.

But there wasn't somebody on the right.

There was a beginning of it with Pat Buchanan saying these are not in our national interest.

But under Trump, that became mainstream Republican policy with a funny twist.

It wasn't passed off as passivity or isolationism.

It was redefined as Jacksonianism.

We don't give an F about these people unless it's in our interest.

He basically said that.

And we're going to go look and scan the world.

And if we see some SOB who is killing Americans or killing our friends, we're going to deal with him, but we're going to deal with them in our terms, in our firepower.

And we're not going to have any pretensions that we're going to try to teach people about race, class, and gender or democracy.

Screw that.

I'm kind of putting words into the Trump mega agenda.

And that's what...

kind of shocked the left.

So you saw these people like Dennis Kucinich on the left and Pat Bugan on the right said, yeah, this is good.

And so that establishment crumbled with the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya with one qualifier, and that was Afghanistan was kept alive with a residual air force.

The Kurds were protected, and we went after the enemies like ISIS with air power in Iraq.

but no more on the ground and trying to rebuild nations.

And I think that's the consensus.

I can't think of any Republican or Democrat.

If he comes up and says, you know what, I have the endorsement of Max Boot and Robert Kagan and Elliott Cohen and all of these, you know, very capable strategists and said they want to go into A, B, and C.

David Brooks the other day wrote a column saying, you know, we've got to protect universal values like, you know, diversity, transgender rights, et cetera, race, class, and gender concerns the world over.

And I don't think there's anybody that believes that.

Donald Trump added another wrinkle to it that was an ancient one.

It was apparent when Napoleon lost his army in Russia.

It was apparent when Lee lost much of his army going north into Gettysburg.

It was apparent during the Revolution.

When you have a national cause and you can't achieve quick victory and you're looking at looming defeat, then there are going to be people who pay for these losses.

Is it the lower white middle class that aren't the cavaliers of the South?

Is it the peasants in Napoleon's army that are frozen to death or wiped out by the Cox for an optional military campaign against Moscow of all places?

Or who's going to die in Afghanistan?

Who's going to die in Iraq?

Who's going to die in Syria?

Who is going to die if you don't go into Libya?

And the answer by 2016 is it's going to be the children of the deplorables and the irredeemables and the clingers and the dregs and the chunks.

And these are the losers of globalization.

So basically you're telling a large swath of the working classes, many of of them the white working classes, but not all.

You're telling them, you never learned to code.

You never learn bicostal culture.

Your skills can be xerox or replicated because they're basically Neanderthal muscular skills.

We can replace you, but you can't replace me, the lawyer, the media expert, the financier, the banker, the insurance salesman, the professor.

So you're less valuable than I am.

So you're good.

Go over there.

And John Kerry basically, remember in 90 and really hurt him in 2004, said, if you don't go to school, you're going to end up in Iraq.

I thought, wow.

I thought it was a noble thing to serve in the U.S.

military and make such sacrifices.

But he let the cat out of the bag that you were a loser, that you didn't get into the bicoastal BA argument from authority culture, and you ended up in Iraq.

So I don't think we're going to be able to do that anymore.

And I'm kind of glad that we're not.

And all of these arguments that people made in the past, such as, well, if the Afghans are worth saving, why don't they fight?

Or if you're Trump, what are the natural resources or what's the benefit to us the old counter argument because the more democracies we have in the world the safer the world they're cogent but they're just not worth the cost to achieve them in the mind of many americans well thank you victor our time is up here so we're going to have to go but we really appreciate your words of wisdom on these battles that went against the stronger military so thank you very much well thank you sammy and i hope everybody when they look at these contemporary questions like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Libya, or even looking back at Vietnam, rather than get into current controversies and invective, and I've been in the middle of it, so I can't plead in any self-righteous manner that I'm innocent of it, but try to look at history and look at things apolitically and say, is this like Sicily?

Is this like the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt?

Try to find parallels that won't be exact, but they'll be instructive.

All right.

So thank you very much.

And this is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Thank you.