I know this guy!

I thought that name sounded familiar.
I saw his book about the Peloponnesian
War being advertised a few years ago, and being interested in such things, I decided to watch a TV show where he was plugging it. He was using that ancient conflict as a lesson on how to run our contemporary foreign policy.

The guy is just another paranoid rightie lightweight, ready to blame everything on those damn liberals, even a war fought 2500 years ago that essentially destroyed Classical Greek civilization for no good reason whatsoever. For starters, he kept talking about the Athenian Calvary, not cavalry, but I figured maybe he wasn't too used to the camera and was just nervous. I should have known better.

But then he got started on the Athenians' disastrous invasion of Sicily, somehow distorting that unfortunate military miscalculation into a stern warning to modern lefty Americans who did NOT want to invade Iraq. WHAAAAAT?

It was amusing, because I had been posting in the Zone just that week how similar the miscalculation of the Athenian fop general Alcibiades was to that of the armchair strategists of the Bush Administration.

Like the US with Al-Quaeda, Athens found itself in a stalemate with Sparta, (getting nowhere in Afghanistan) and not knowing how to deploy her unstoppable navy against Sparta's invincible army, decided to pick a fight with a third party who had nothing to do with her own troubles. She called on her marines, the pride of her armed forces. Sicily is a long way from Athens, especially if you have to row.

No, the Greek colony at Syracuse had no petroleum, but she was rich, and had no friends in the region. Athens figured it would look good on their record, and bring in some much-needed cash to the treasury (Sicilian tribute would pay for the invasion and then some). Does any of this sound familiar?

The historical parallels were obvious, but he somehow managed to extract precisely the opposite lessons from that ancient Greek tragedy. Like so many of our conservative analysts, he was capable of turning any totally disconnected historical event into evidence of why his political superstitions must be correct. Here was historical evidence why we HAD to invade Mesopotamia. (The Athenian expeditionary force was annihilated, but that's neither here nor there. We are still in Iraq.). Alcibiades, by the way, managed to avoid participating in the invasion and eventually turned traitor against his homeland.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Just because we know history, doesn't mean we have learned anything from it. We ARE condemned to repeating its mistakes. But what do I know? I'm no expert on chainsaw felonies.

Calvary my ass. Needless to say, I didn't buy his book.