Here’s an excellent profile piece about one of our favorite writers, Victor Davis Hanson: Right Way to Farm the Classics. (Hat tip: mal.)

“In the list of 10 reasons to go to Iraq,” Hanson said, “I think WMD was about the 10th. I’ve told the administration that they made a mistake placing too much emphasis on it.”

At a White House Christmas gathering, Bush approached him, asking, “How’m I doing?” Before the flustered Hanson could fully respond, he said, the president had assured him, “I’m not finished yet,” and walked on to other guests. This pleased Hanson, whose historical heroes are decisive men ranging from the Athenian leader Pericles to Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose tactical brilliance at the Battle of Shiloh and brutal “March to the Sea” helped break the back of the Confederacy.

In Hanson’s opinion, expressed in his recent military history “Ripples of Battle,” Bush, despite intellectual shortcomings (“he lacked his predecessor’s encyclopedic knowledge of names, places and dates”), was the right leader at the right time in responding to Sept. 11.

“The terrorist war proved that he [Bush], like the Greek iambic poet Archilochus’ hedgehog,” Hanson wrote, “knew one thing, but a big one: how to galvanize his people and lead them into battle against an evil enemy in the hour of his country’s great peril.”