Footnotes
By As science has already proven Victor Davis Hanson to be a hopeless tool, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that he also fails to appreciate some of the many differences between journalism and historical scholarship.
Every source in Cobra II, Fiasco, or State of Denial, may be accurate, but we will never know that, because for a variety of reasons the authors who claim they worked from notes and recordings, chose not to identify the most inflammatory sources by name. It would be as if I wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War and, to support my most controversial points, added footnotes that stated “A manuscript in the Vatican,” or “Private letter to author from anonymous Greek shepherd attesting a stone altar in his field.”
Like Victor Davis Hanson, I can’t imagine why any internal — nay, “inflammatory” — critics of this administration would feel the least bit reluctant to break the threshold of anonymity and disclose to the world what they know. After all, there really isn’t any appreciable difference between a source who’s been dead for two thousand years and one whose career and personal life might be imperiled by speaking on the record to a journalist like Michael Gordon, Thomas Ricks, or Bob Woodward. And if history teaches us anything, it is this — unless journalists reveal their sources immediately, the world will be forever deprived of the knowledge we are owed.