Word: hansons
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...Some answers spring to mind: massive air power and an alliance with local forces exploiting the Afghans' disenchantment with the Taliban's cruel excesses. But a new book?Carnage and Culture by Victor David Hanson (Doubleday; 492 pages) published a month before the Sept. 11 atrocity?suggests a more fundamental reason: a facility for swift wars of annihilation that Westerners began acquiring in the valleys of Greece 2,800 years...
...Hanson, a classics professor at California State University at Fresno, first analyzed Western military dynamism in his 1989 work, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Ancient Greece. He argued that the Western military ethos is traceable to warring Greek city-states, which contracted among themselves to meet at an agreed-on battlefield, fight to a decisive conclusion and not yield that field until one side was broken. The idea took root that war's central purpose was to "find and engage (the enemy) in order to end the entire business as quickly as possible." Subtitled Landmark Battles...
...carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome?established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...
Springfest featuring Hanson...
...relief worker in Pakistan, your days are filled with everything from caring for the hungry to braving anti-American slurs. Sigurd Hanson, director of the International Rescue Committee's refugee-aid operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, is keeping a diary of his daily life. Read it at time.com/hanson--and if you want to help out, go to the IRC's website at www.intrescom.org...