Hanson interviewed by Hew Hughitt.

Check out Hew Hughitt's interview with our favorite Hoover fellow.

This passage is a doozie:

HH: Yes. Here’s a paragraph from Newsweek. “Nor did many hard-liners in Washington ever fully understand that using raw power to impose democracy on peoples who were not ready to seize it for themselves was a phantom. By insisting on the cure-all elections in countries and territories that had not institutions of justice and security, or a politically aware economic middle class to sustain democracy, the Bush team clearly seems to have overreached.” Now I read that to you because it makes so many assumptions. It’s almost a cartoon about what has happened.

VDH: It is.

HH: Explain what your reaction to that is.

VDH: It’s pathologically lying. I mean, they had this idea that we went into the Middle East, and serially knocked off…we took out the Taliban and we took out Saddam. That’s two of 21 nations. Then we politely pressured for democratic reform in Egypt. You can’t work with Iran and Syria. We didn’t invade them. And we were given a hopeless situation where people wanted to have an election. We tried to insist on Constitutional guarantees. They elected it, they got their government, we said fine, we approve of the process, we don’t approve of the result, we’re not going to pay for it any longer. Then, they chose to have some type of civil war, which we’re not supposed to use that word, because it’s supposedly…in Iraq, it didn’t apply, but supposedly…this is a civil war, but we’re not supposed to use that word. So I don’t understand where this neoconservative agenda supposedly was knocking off countries and imposing democracies.

I don't either. I mean, it's only 2 of 21 countries, people! Everyone knows that, for it to count as an actual agenda, there has to be at least 3 countries knocked off and Democracy-imposed. But there's only 2 -- so Newsweek is pathologically lying.

Anyway, if the Iraqis hadn't chosen to have a civil war, we wouldn't be talking about this anyway.