Hola! Cómo es usted, Don Victor Davis Hanson? How’s the weather in Fresno, ya greaves-fondling, sabre-rattling, modern-day small-‘h’ homer? Did you know that your stilted, think tank-funded nostalgia for the butchery of yore arrives each Thursday on my doorstep like a freshly violated corpse tossed upon a cold morgue slab?

(The rigor mortis belongs to the San Francisco Chronicle, the stench is mostly yours.)

So now I’m glancing over your latest op-ed … and Holy Hot-n-Hunky Hoplites! What’s this?!? A whole column with no mention of Alexander? Nary a paean to William Tecumseh Sherman? Not even the smallest, man-crushingly creepy peep about Leonidas?!?

Well, fuck that. Here I was, so looking forward to ‘Ode to a Grecian War Crime, Part Teh MCMLDVXXQWVII!I1!Lth’ from your bloody pen. I want my quarter back.

Still, History, as we well know, is written by the Victor(Davis Hanson)s … even when he’s writing about the present. And if that doesn’t make much sense, never mind, let’s press on. As usual, the important stuff to look at in a VDH column is what he doesn’t say:

Begging for a Bombing

What should we make of the Iranians’ behavior?

By Victor Davis Hanson

It’s probably a good rule to do the opposite of anything the Iranian theocracy wants. Apparently, this government is now doing its darnedest to be bombed. So, for the time being, we should not grant them this wish.

Mark this date, PNAC signatories. For today, Victor Davis Hanson has invented the ‘I-Know-You-Are-But-What-Am-I Doctrine’. Equally as useful on the kindergarten playground as it is at the highest levels of foreign policy. As a bonus, it goes hand-in-hand with the ‘Am-So!’ theory of tax policy recently put forth by Rudy Giuliani.

Not to spoil the rest of the column, but the most laughable aspect of VDH’s posturing here is his need to make the reasonable course of action sound all bellicose and macho. He’s not a fool – well, he is, but he’s more of a liar and a propagandist – and he knows his audience. Thus, like anybody with half a brain, he realizes that launching a war against Iran would be lunacy, but he has to sell the peaceful route to the pocket Clauswitzes who make up his readership as the belligerent one.

In short, unlike those fucking Euro-weenies, we’re avoiding war for strictly warlike reasons. Got that? Here, let VDH explain:

In the last three years, the ranting adolescent theocrats in Tehran have alienated the United Nations’ Security Council to the point of earning trade sanctions. That’s a hard thing to do, given the U.N.’s bias toward the former third world and the way China and Russia value petroleum and trade above all else.

Note the careful eliding of the Security Council and the full UN. The former is scarcely biased towards the ‘former third world’; the latter may or may not be but it doesn’t really matter because the Security Council makes the legally binding resolutions.

Prior to capturing last month 15 British military personnel, Iran had for years misled and embarrassed Britain, Germany, and France, who all tried to negotiate a peaceful end to Iranian nuclear proliferation. And as a rule, these are European nations that will suffer almost any indignity to talk a problem away.

‘Misled and embarrassed’? ‘Indignity’? Why does all of this sound more like some 18th-century tale of besmirched honor and pistols at dawn than the brutal reality of 21st-century armed conflict?

And talk about your hair triggers. Remind me to bolt in the opposite direction whenever I see VDH ‘making it rain’.

Our beef with Iran, of course, goes back well before George W. Bush’s presidency.

True that. Just off the top of my head, there was Operation Ajax … the U.S. backing of crazy-ass Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which killed, like, 1 million Iranians … oh, oh, oh! And that time when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 …

“The Great Satan� as a slur for America was coined when Jimmy Carter was president. In 1979, student gangsters stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took hostages. Prior to 9/11, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization.

Oh. Apparently, none of that stuff ever happened.

And by kidnapping last month the British sailors and marines, Iran de facto involved the European Union — Iran’s largest trading partner. The country’s leadership apparently worried little about retaliations from NATO, since their officers, according to one former top-ranking military official with whom I spoke, had been orchestrating the killing of Americans inside Iraq since well before Iranian vessels intercepted a British boat they claimed was in Iranian waters.

That was some dastardly shit, actually. Highly uncivilized. The British, by the way, regularly serve tea and crumpets to the crews of all of those Iranian gunboats patrolling the English Channel.

They’re terribly polite that way.

Because of incompetence in their oil industry, the Iranian mullahs have achieved the impossible: Despite having among the world’s largest petroleum reserves, their production is shrinking and they have managed to earn increasingly less petrodollars even as the world price has soared.

Wow. It sounds like Iran’s oil industry is almost as fucked-up as Iraq’s!

While the Iranian theocrats understand that the entire world, including many of their own citizens, is turning against them, they also know that this could change if a Western nation would just attack them. Their strategy seems to be to find a way to provoke someone to drop a few bombs on them, on the naive assumption that such an assault would be of limited duration and damage. Such an attack, they may figure, would earn them sympathy in much of the world .

See, I don’t think Hanson is totally off base here. The Iranian leadership probably is playing that dangerous game. What VDH leaves out is, you know, what options do they have and what have they got to lose? We’ve invaded and occupied one of their neighbors and have a strong military/strategic presence in several others. It’s almost like we’ve got them surrounded.

Meanwhile, it’s not like cynically tapping into domestic bellicosity for political gain hasn’t ever been done before.

It is undeniable that the U.S., without either invading or suffering many casualties, could use its air power to send the Iranian economy and military back to the mullahs’ cherished seventh century. But there is no need to do so.

Gee, thanks, Don Hanson. Because that would be a shame and it could even get messy on the “actually-living-people-who-would-then-be-dead” front as well. Those would be the ones you can’t bring yourself to actually write about, but then again, read-between-the-lines, right?