2000 Years Hence

I think far into the future, after America's preeminence has faded into history, historians will surely look back and say that Victor Davis Hanson was the most eloquent and insightful commentator of our times. Very few individuals throughout history have been remembered, not because of their leadership or feats of battle, but because of how they described their times and the events that defined them. Victor Davis Hanson will surely be one of these people.

His latest story So Lucky To Have Them celebrates the sacrifices of the American soldier and the task that history has placed in their hands:

No, instead let us think today only of American soldiers and the cause for which they fight. Never has America fielded more skilled warriors or sent them into battle for a better cause—the security of thousands of Americans at home and the promise of something better for millions abroad. Any scarred veteran of a past age—a Macedonian, Roman, Ottoman, Russian or Englishman—would warn us that even an imperialist does not go into the Balkans, Afghanistan, or the Mesopotamia for lucre. These are not nice places and their perennially murderous and internecine clans historically unite only to turn on the invader. Yet into precisely these desolate realms the Americans have gone to rid the world of Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, the latter all in their own singular ways worthy successors to the spirit of a Hitler or Stalin, their evil inferior only by magnitude rather than intent. Seeking not tribute or oil, our soldiers have deposed such monsters and in their place implanted the seeds of democracy—and succeeded entirely due to their own skill and élan rather than the uniform support and attention of us at home who sent them.

How many times did prominent Washingtonians assure us that the Balkans were our graveyard, that the peaks of Afghanistan would be our Little Big Horn, or that Iraq is a modern Sicilian Expedition?

And how many other ignorant elites assured us of secret Afghan pipelines and Enron’s designs on the Iraqi oilfields? The more banal truth all along was such battlefields held no profit, but rather much danger—that was trumped in every case by the skill and courage of the American soldier, mostly to silence back home. I reckon that for the ultimate health and safety of this nation one American Marine in Fallujah is worth more than the entire 9-11 board of inquiry in Washington—and I would prefer a single American officer to a hundred of those grandees who assure us that what we are doing is either wrong or impossible.

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No, despite all the chaos in Washington, these are not bad, but rather noble times, among the best I think in our history. So let us remember the famous words of Virgil – indeed perhaps the most moving in all of Latin literature:

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

“The day will come when even this ordeal will be a sweet thing to remember.”

And so it shall be when it is all said and done.

Someone should convince G.W. Bush to read a piece like this for his next state of the union address.