Politics & Power Quote by Victor Davis Hanson

There is a tell in the swagger: “The fact is.” Hanson isn’t just arguing; he’s trying to close the argument. The line performs certainty as a political weapon, the kind of declarative moral posture that flourished in the early Iraq War era when doubt itself was framed as weakness. “Beneath the hype” positions him as the clear-eyed realist cutting through media noise, but it also smuggles in a preemptive dismissal of contrary evidence: if Iraqis don’t “soon appreciate” the invasion, the problem can be reclassified as more “hype,” more distortion, more ingratitude.

The sentence is built on a clean binary: American “help and idealism” versus French “perfidy.” That’s not analysis so much as an identity map. France becomes a convenient foil - old Europe, cynical diplomacy, supposed betrayal - so American action can read as inherently virtuous. The insult does cultural work: it converts a contested coalition debate into a morality play, where skepticism is not prudence but treachery.

Then comes the clincher: “It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom - never.” The repetition is a rhetorical padlock. By defining the war as “freedom,” Hanson tries to make outcomes irrelevant; if freedom is the side you’re on, you’ve already won the ethical case. That’s the subtext: policy becomes a test of allegiance, not competence.

Context matters. In 2003, the wager was that liberation would be quick, gratitude inevitable, and democratic institutions would bloom on schedule. The quote captures that moment’s self-confidence - and its escape hatch: when history gets messy, moral absolutism offers a way to stay right without being accurate.