Torturing History: A military historian abuses the past.

• Author: Bray, Chris
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, by Victor Davis Hanson, New York: Doubleday, 320 pages, $29.95

YOU'RE IN A crowded room, watching someone rail about some issue of politics or culture. He's loud, sloppy with facts. He's trashing his own position, discrediting the very thing that he believes. Which--here's the problem--is pretty much the same thing you happen to believe. He's a wrecking ball on legs, taking out the walls of his own house, and you live there too.

So let's talk about Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist and author of The Western Way of War, The Soul of Battle, and other popular military histories. Hanson has long served as a spokesman for "Western" values, a job that has taken on a new stature after 9/II. With a family farm, a teaching job at Cal State Fresno, and a column for National Review Online, he's positioned to be the voice we hear from the bedrock-from down there in the real America, the place we apparently came from before we got lost in the thickets of cultural relativism and snarky academic trendiness.

Hanson's career argument, most recently advanced in the book Carnage and Culture, is that military forces are most likely to win wars when they are composed of free men with common values who are defending their own land, whether against a direct threat or against an ideology that creates a feeling of being threatened. "Freedom," he writes, "turns out to be a military asset." When I first reviewed Carnage and Culture for a newspaper a few months ago, I was so grateful to read some alternative to the usual nonsense about how military training turns men into unthinking cogs who only do what they're told-which is always somehow supposed to be a good thing-that I failed to notice how bad this book actually is.

To be sure, by approaching military history with an eye for the utility of freedom, Hanson is off to a good start. If you want to talk about free men taking up arms against a threat, we can talk about the Marines on Iwo Jima whose officer corps was ripped apart, who were separated from their units, and who fought on effectively, improvising and agreeing: I'm gonna try to get a grenade into that hunker--you guys cover me. We can talk about the soldiers who were allowed to vote for their own commander-in chief in 1864--not a common 19th century event-and who voted overwhelmingly for Abraham Lincoln, who had vowed to fight until the South capitulated. "The men who would have to do the fighting," writes the historian James McPherson, "had voted by a far larger...