An Autumn of War What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism

by HANSON, VICTOR DAVIS

• ISBN13: 9781400031139
• ISBN10: 1400031133
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-13
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

On September 11, 2001, hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the eminent military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article in which he asserted that the United States, like it or not, was now at war and had the moral right to respond with force.An Autumn of War, which opens with that first essay, will stimulate readers across the political spectrum to think more deeply about the attacks, the war, and their lessons for all of us.

Author Biography

Victor Davis Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University. He farmed full-time for five years before returning to academia in 1984 to initiate a Classics program at California State University, Fresno. Currently, he is Professor of Classics there and Coordinator of the Classical Studies Program.<br><br>Hanson has written articles, editorials, and reviews for the <i>New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, American Heritage, City Journal, American Spectator, National Review, Policy Review, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard</i>, and <i>Washington Times</i>, and has been interviewed on numerous occasions on National Public Radio

Table of Contents

Chronology of Events
Introduction: Why September 11 Won't Go Away
September
What Are We Made Of?	p. 3
Western Nations Are Slow to Anger, but Lethal in Their Fury	p. 6
Cornered	p. 9
Great Leaders Are Forged in War	p. 11
War Myths	p. 15
Pseudo-Military History	p. 19
General Sherman, the Western Way of War, and September 11	p. 24
What if?	p. 38
What Would Churchill Say?	p. 43
October
On Gorgons and Furies	p. 49
Cognitive Dissonance	p. 53
What Made Them Do Their Duty?	p. 57
Tragedy or Therapy?	p. 64
War on All Fronts	p. 69
Truth and Consequences	p. 75
The Time Machine	p. 79
If This Be War	p. 86
Class War	p. 92
Ripples of Battle	p. 96
November
War Talk	p. 103
The Dogs of War	p. 112
Heads, They Win	p. 118
More an Okinawa Than a Vietnam?	p. 123
Five Not-So-Easy Pieces	p. 127
They're Back!	p. 132
The Time Is Now	p. 138
A Voice from the Past	p. 145
The More Things Change	p. 154
December
Questions Not Asked	p. 163
Dates in Infamy	p. 168
The Pied Piper of Tora Bora	p. 173
Our Jurassic Park	p. 178
Odd Couple Out	p. 184
Pillars of Ignorance	p. 189
The Iron Veil	p. 200
Glad We Are Not Fighting Ourselves	p. 204
It Really Is Your Father's Europe	p. 208
Winners and Losers	p. 214
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

I.

September

(The destruction of the World Trade Center; the attack on the Pentagon; the explosion of four jet airliners; President Bush's promises of a worldwide war on terror; dispatch of American carriers to the Indian Ocean; initial criticism of proposed American response both at home and abroad)

During the three-week lull between September 11 and our military response in early October, it was not clear when and if America would strike back. Despite our president's immediate and firm assurance that we would battle terrorists across the globe for years to come, critics both here and abroad immediately questioned the morality of our tactics in bombing the terrorist enclaves in Afghanistan and the military feasibility of finding the al-Qaeda camps--and then destroying them without either killing scores of innocent civilians or causing such disruption as to precipitate wide-scale starvation and disease.

In addition, we did not know exactly the number of our own dead, as casualties on September 11 were at first feared to be in the tens of thousands, before generally being reduced to a round figure of between seven thousand and three thousand killed--a total by January 2002 that would be generally recognized as around three thousand fatalities. Both friends in Europe and neutrals and enemies in the Middle East demanded "proof" that bin Laden had, in fact, masterminded the attacks. Yet throughout these dark days, the Taliban and al-Qaeda alike promised annihilation for any Americans foolish enough to enter Afghanistan and raised the specter of further terrorist attacks here and abroad against the United States.

In the numbing aftermath of September 11, Americans were presented with a daily variety of myths--military, cultural, and political--designed to temper our military response. I was chiefly worried that we were awash in a sea of false knowledge concerning everything from the military history of Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam, misinformation about the Northern Alliance, half-truths about the effectiveness of our air forces, the purportedly hopeless struggle against a "new" form of terror, the reasons for al-Qaeda's assault, and the nature of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

September was perhaps the most hectic and depressing month in our nation's history. In the following nine essays, composed in those times of chaos and uncertainty, I employed occasional parody, posed counterfactual scenarios, and drew on classical history--as well as the careers of General Sherman and Winston Churchill, the 2,500-year Western military tradition, the heroism of the New York policemen and firefighters, and our struggle against the Japanese during World War II--all to argue that we had no choice but to counterattack long and hard in Afghanistan.

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Excerpted from An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism by Victor Davis Hanson
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