Dueling historians: Lt. Col. Bob Bateman's takedown of Victor Davis Hanson

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his
favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns.
This originally ran on November 4, 2010.

I
could never quite figure out what irked me so much about Victor Davis "Carnage 'n' Culture'' Hanson's work until I read John
A. Lynn. I liked what I read by Hanson about ancient
Greece, but as Lynn shows, the further Hanson wandered
from ancient Greece, the less he seemed like a historian and the more he came
off like a polemicist
with an agenda.
Lt. Col. Bob Bateman,
who is both an active-duty officer and an academic with terrific credentials in
military history, delivered the coup de grace in a series of articles I hadn't seen
until recently.