Victor Davis Hanson, a former classics professor, is a renowned conservative scholar of ancient history and military affairs who's recently become a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger. The author of 17 books with titles like "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," "An Autumn of War" and "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming," he is the senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus. Hanson, whose scholarship and interest in individual freedom recently earned him a 2008 Bradley Prize worth $250,000 from the Bradley Foundation, was on his farm near the central California town of Selma when I called to ask him about his favorite war books.

Q: What's the greatest book on war ever written?

A: I think Thucydides' "Peloponnesian War" is the most astute. It's the second-earliest history of war and it's not only a testament to the use of source material and the ability to provide a coherent narrative, but it's analytical and it becomes almost philosophical in its dissection of human nature.

Q: Has everyone else been trying to rise to those standards ever since?

A: Yes, I think so. The adjective "Thucydidean" is pretty much a standard brand now that people understand that ideally a historian would have three components in a successful history: One would be that they would use source materials in an analytic rather than prejudicial manner; and two, they would be able to draw together a lot of sources and provide an engaging narrative; and then three, that their history would speak to readers in terms of philosophy beyond just the particular history or period or era they are narrating.

Q: What was the best book about World War II?

A: I think Gerhard Weinberg's "A World at Arms" (1994: Cambridge University Press). It's a single-volume (1,208-page) history of World War II. What's so good about it is, he looks at it in a holistic fashion, so we understand for the first time how the Balkan uprising affected German war plans. Or what was going on in the Japanese empire in places like Korea or Taiwan or Mainland China and how that affected the war with the British. Or what were people in the Nazi Party talking to Hitler about in terms of alternate plans rather than what actually happened. He understands source material very well and he has an eye for trying to give us a world at war other than just Britain, Germany and the United States. It shows how their ideas filtered out into so many different theaters and how the ultimate result of that is how lucky we were to win.

Q: What's the best anti-war book?

A: There was a whole genre of anti-war books that followed the First World War. There are novels such as "All Quiet on the Western Front" or memoirs like Robert Graves' "Good-bye to All That," or poetry by people like Siegfried Sassoon that came out of the World War I experience in Europe. Europe had never experienced anything like that before. There are other things that have been written, like "The Red Badge of Courage," and plays going back to the Greeks, like "The Trojan Women" or Aristophanes' comedy "Lysistrata," that were anti-war in nature. But it seems to me that World War I and the advent of industrial war created entire new genres of novels, poetry and memoirs that started with the premise that there was nothing at all possibly glorious about war.

Q: Would you agree with that last phrase you uttered?

A: To an extent. I am not one of these people that is common now who see World War I as a tragedy in the sense that there was no moral or ethical difference between Germany of 1914 and France and England. If one were to look at the nature of German aggression in Europe, the nature of German colonies overseas, or what the German agenda was, it seems to me that it was very different than the liberal tradition in France and England that prevailed. It's a tragedy that it had to end in a war like that, but given the superiority of the German Wehrmacht in 1914, I don't know any other way how anybody would have stopped it. In terms of artillery, in terms of personal arms, in terms of general staff, railroads, communications, esprit de corps, it was so far superior to the colonial armies of France and England. The ambitions of the German Kaiser were so ambitious, I don't know how anybody could have done anything other than what they did. They would have either had to appease them or capitulate. It was a tragedy. But I do think there was a qualitative difference in the fact that the Allies won. It had a profound effect on Europe. The tragedy of World War I, it seems to me, is how the Versailles Treaty ended and the Allies were not willing to remain vigilant, because given their enormous losses in the war there was sort of a utopian pacifism that followed.

Q: You've been reading books about the war in Iraq by various participants. They're all sort of pointing fingers of blame at each other for various reasons. Which book so far do you find to be the most informative and the most credible?

A: I think the most recent that I read, (former undersecretary of defense) Douglas Feith's "War and Decision," is the most informative. And I think it's the most credible for one reason - that it's the best documented. More importantly, he has deliberately avoided or promised not to use a technique that has been very common in other books like Tom Rick's "Fiasco" or Trainor and Gordon's "Cobra II." By that I mean he has not had anonymous sources in the footnotes. So we don't see "senior Pentagon official" or "junior American diplomat" cited after a direct quotation. Nor do we see, as we see in Bob Woodward's books, conversations repeated verbatim inside a room with three people and we don't know who gave him that information. That means the information can never be checked.

Whereas in the case of Feith, he not only cited things, he put it on his Web site and a person can go to the Web site and click on the footnote and see whether the footnote reflects accurately what it is supposed to. And I don't think he was trying to get even. Part of the problem with that genre is that, a), it's right in the middle of a war; and b), when Paul Bremer writes he's going to blame Feith and he's going to blame Gen. Sanchez. When Gen. Sanchez is going to write, he's going to blame Bremer and Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks is going to say I did a great job and I left and everything was right. Gen. Sanchez is now going to blame Bremer . once you get into that cycle it's unending.

I think if you read carefully what Feith wrote, a), he didn't do that, and b), he takes some of the blame himself. It's an apology in a sense for the idea that the Pentagon had a war plan, had people listened to then rather than the State Department, things would be better than they are now. It's not "My brilliant war was ruined by somebody else's lousy occupation." That's pretty much the subtext of every other (book). Continued...