I dearly love a good Victor Davis Hanson smackdown.
VDH also has the chutzpah to call Carter “historically ignorant”, a fascinating charge coming from a man whose grasp even on his specialty is tenuous, and the bulk of whose professional career has been an (often successful) effort to make Americans MORE ignorant of the history of military affairs.
Another juicy bit quoted from Hanson is “Far more importantly, we can chart the rise of radical political Islam with the storming of the American embassy in Teheran and the impotent response of Jimmy Carter.”
The repressive government of the Shah (CIA backing and all) had no real bearing, you see, on the rise of radicalism in Iran. All Khomeini and his crew needed was a real whipping from the USMC, or something– not the Shah’s sissy-boys– to get them to go away. Talk about “historically ignorant”!
The repressive government of the Shah (CIA backing and all) had no real bearing, you see, on the rise of radicalism in Iran.
Yeah, and Savak and the “black slave” had nothing to do with it either.