From the comment bag

• General blogroll policy: If you link to me on your blogroll, let me know, I'm happy to reciprocate. So Dead Issue gets added, as soon as I can get to the template editor...
  
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• From Sven, this link to a review of Victor Davis Hanson's screed about the Peloponnesian War made me laugh. Especially this bit:

  Some of the other mistakes are on a whole different scale. Take the title, A War Like No Other. If Hanson believes that the Peloponnesian War was really so unique, why does he spend his first chapters making far-fetched connections between that war and every other war in history? If he wanted his title to reflect what he actually argues, Hanson should have called this book A War Like Nearly Every Other, Especially Iraq.

What always gets me is the North American conception of the Peloponnesian War always sees America as Athens. Now, there are some definite similarities, but it's unclear to me why an American would see this as a good thing. What's the laudatory aspect of Athenian history? The way it turned a defensive alliance in to a vehicle for imperial power and enriching one city? The poorly thought out strategies of Pericles which brought Athens to war without a means to win? Maybe the most eerily prescient part of Thucydides is when Pericles tells the liberals in Athens -- who were arguing that Athens should take a softer line with the subject cities -- that while democracy was all well and good for Athens, the world had to be ruled as a tyranny. Athens, Pericles said, couldn't afford to let go of the empire once they had it, because the cities who'd once been Athens' subjects would turn around and destroy Athens.

I think every single conqueror in history has probably just repeated Pericles. But again, why would an American (other than crazy old Victor Hanson) ever see this as a good thing, something worth emulating?