Victor Davis Hanson: Three Wars, Little News
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
It is a busy time in America. The Major League Baseball playoffs are competing with the upcoming midterm elections for the public’s attention. The rescue of courageous miners in Chile has for a time overshadowed even the latest psychodramas of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
There is endemic fear among Americans that continual $1 trillion–plus annual deficits and near–10 percent unemployment are about to destroy the vaunted American standard of living. Who has time to worry about much else?
That said, we have been sleeping through three major wars that will soon wake us up.
This summer, Americans were dying in combat in Afghanistan at rates not seen since the summer of 2007 in Iraq. In congressional hearings that year, furious legislators grilled Gen. David Petraeus and cited the high number of monthly combat deaths to prematurely declare his surge a failure. MoveOn.org ran ads calling Petraeus a traitor (“General Betray Us”) for continuing the war amid such losses....
Read entire article at National Review
It is a busy time in America. The Major League Baseball playoffs are competing with the upcoming midterm elections for the public’s attention. The rescue of courageous miners in Chile has for a time overshadowed even the latest psychodramas of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
There is endemic fear among Americans that continual $1 trillion–plus annual deficits and near–10 percent unemployment are about to destroy the vaunted American standard of living. Who has time to worry about much else?
That said, we have been sleeping through three major wars that will soon wake us up.
This summer, Americans were dying in combat in Afghanistan at rates not seen since the summer of 2007 in Iraq. In congressional hearings that year, furious legislators grilled Gen. David Petraeus and cited the high number of monthly combat deaths to prematurely declare his surge a failure. MoveOn.org ran ads calling Petraeus a traitor (“General Betray Us”) for continuing the war amid such losses....