Victor Davis Hanson - National Review columnist, syndicated columnist, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and author of books too numerous to mention - has seen fit to respond to this past weekend’s print edition. I told him I’d post the whole e-mail - so here it is:

Dear Gil Smart,

I was just forwarded your opinion-piece concerning a Wall Street Journal essay I was asked to write two years ago on the 60th anniversary of WWII to commemorate the American achievement. You entirely misrepresented its contents to your readers-why I am not entirely sure.

As a journalist and editor surely you should be held to higher standards than trying to make easy, snide comments  about “right wing” and “right wingers” for partisan purposes. An anniversary, not Iraq, prompted the Wall Street Journal invitation.

You allege that I wrote that we alone won World War II:  “With maybe a little help from the Rooskis”.

That is simply not true. Here’s what I actually wrote in the column that you did not pass on to your readership.

“Credit for victory was not ours alone. Our British and Soviet allies had fought longer and killed far more Germans.”

I then informed the reader that the Russians killed two out of three Wehrmacht soldiers. In all fairness reference to that fact is hardly “maybe a little help from the Rooskis.”

You then go on:

“To say, then, that “we” won the war seems not only historically dubious - but almost obscene. Yet Hanson was merely reiterating the nation-centric history we all learn and cherish. And the subtext of his piece was that we did it then, so we can do it now; all we need to do is stay the course and we will prevail, because we are exceptional.”

Far from being “obscene” , the essay in fact made three points that were contrary to your very notion that I was a simple triumphalist;

1. The United States committed dozens of tactical and strategic errors throughout WWII;

2. We were often in a morally ambiguous position of siding with one mass-murderer against another;

3. If, in comparison to the land war alone, one were to look at the numerous European theaters the US was engaged in-by sea, air, and land-the amount of aid given the Red Army, and the concurrent Pacific war, then it was clear that the American effort turned the tide.

You may think the above argument is the standard view of WWII, and that you in contrast are studying history perhaps to find out the truth masked by triumphalist American history.

But you will soon discover in your historical studies, and in fact as the essay points out, that it is  now the common revisionist interpretation to depreciate somewhat the American role, by arguing that the carnage inflicted on the German army in the east by the Red Army was the decisive blow that ruined Hitler’s efforts.

I recently debated the British military historian Max Hastings at the D-Day museum in New Orleans-he arguing for the primacy of the Red Army effort, I the more multifarious American role. We both made arguments with civility, and examined in fairness the countervailing arguments. No one called the other names, or in your fashion misrepresented views or misquoted the other’s work.

As far as the charge of “exceptional”, I think as you restudy 7,500 years of civilized history, you too will come to appreciate how unique is the US Constitution and the rarity of a democratic military under civilian auspices fighting so successfully far from home. This has nothing to do, as you imply, with  my “belief that we sit atop the global trash heap because of our innate virtue, because God prefers us.”

As you know, I never mentioned God or would refer to the present order as the “global trash heap.” American exceptionalism has nothing to do with religion or race, but derives from a Western commitment to constitutional government, self-critique, and freedom of expression, in a long, often troubled odyssey from the classical world to the Founding Fathers to our own generation.

I think your glib accusations are beneath an editor, and so hope you might print or post this clarification for the benefit of your readers,

Sincerely,

Victor Davis Hanson

A few thoughts.

First, you may read the 2005 VDH essay I referenced here and judge for yourself.

I remembered it specifically because I was so taken aback by it; by the fact that Hanson said not that we helped win the war or that the war would not have been won without the United States, but that we won it. Which he states again here. Followed by an accusation, which he’s made elsewhere, that those who suggest otherwise are “revisionists.”

But is that to say that there cannot any reexamination of history as written by the victors, who immediately entered into a cold war with their former allies - and who then had both ideological purpose to downplay the sacrifices or contribution of its former ally and simply may not have known or grasped the scope of the carnage there:

Yet the war on the Eastern Front is still obscure, largely because of the Cold War. During that period, the USSR’s immense archives concerning the conflict were essentially closed to Western scholars. At the same time, the decisive impact of America’s erstwhile ally was often deliberately underplayed in the West for political reasons.

My charge is that some still do this.

None of this is to excuse the barbarism the Soviet Union showed in its war with Germany, which repaid German barbarism; none of this is to pretend that we didn’t have to make moral decisions then and support immoral things in order to win the war. It is to say, let us lay out the facts, let us lay out the casualties, let us look at the maps that we might see the vast battlefields, let us take account of the human suffering both inflicted and endured, and who comes out ahead on that tally sheet? If our efforts in the air and at sea and on different fronts turned the tide, then yes, let us say, accurately, that without us the war would not have been won.

But imagine living in a United States where casualties mimicked what the Soviets endured in World War II. Some 13 percent of the Soviet population was killed in World War II, both soldiers and civilians; imagine, then, living in a United States where there were not 418,000 deaths but perhaps eight million soldiers killed; where another nine million civilian casualties came in battles fought upon our own soil.

If we had we experienced carnage on this scale - and then had to listen to allies who fought on further-flung battlefields, yes, who fought in the air and undersea and supplied us with the material to fight off the assault but did nowhere near the same amount of bleeding tell us that they won the war - do you suppose Americans would be offended? And do you suppose they might have sound reason to be?

But more important than quantifying the sacrifice or the contribution then is the upshot now. My concern is that when we base current policy decisions on history as seen through a political lens, our decisions may be unsound. When we suppose that the war in the Middle East is World War II redux - and Hanson has written column after column comparing and conflating the conflicts - we blind ourselves to the differences, chief among them that in Iraq we attacked a nation that had not attacked nor declared war upon us first, thereby delegitimizing our action in the eyes of much of the world.

But beyond that is the moral question. Hanson correctly points out that in World War II we sometimes had to choose between brutal dictators; we had to embrace tactics which resulted in death on a scale far greater than what we saw in Iraq. This is true; but again, in this war, instigated by us, we bear a greater culpability for the death we have unleashed in Iraq. Had Iraqis attacked us, that would not have been the case; but they did not attack us.

This pre-emptive strategy of ours bears all the more moral resopnsibility. And trying to explain it all away as well, death happens in wars is a particular obscenity.

In the end, Dr. Hanson and I will disagree; he obviously knows his history better than me, but at the same time, a reading of what I wrote will show that in no way did I attribute the notion of God or the “global trash heap” to him; and to hear a columnist for the National Review decry a partisan slam is pretty risible.

But at least he was more erudite than Bill O’Reilly.