Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent piece on the failure of his critics (who with few exceptions are just attacking the war by proxy) to appreciate what we have done and what warfare has looked like in the past:
The blame with this war falls not with Donald Rumsfeld. We are more often the problem — our mercurial mood swings and demands for instant perfection devoid of historical perspective about the tragic nature of god-awful war. Our military has waged two brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been an even more inspired postwar success in Afghanistan where elections were held in a country deemed a hopeless Dark-Age relic. A thousand brave Americans gave their lives in combat to ensure that the most wicked nation in the Middle East might soon be the best, and the odds are that those remarkable dead, not the columnists in New York, will be proven right — no thanks to post-facto harping from thousands of American academics and insiders in chorus with that continent of appeasement Europe.
While the Baathists and their Islamist friends are resisting more effectively than I thought they would be able to back in May 2003, we are still waging and effective fight against them to buy time and are creating a free Iraq to finish the fight. The fact that our press gets the vapors when the enemy actually fights back (instead of just following our perfect plan) is unfortunate. That opponents of the war jump on any failing in the war--failings that are natural, the result of the friction of war--to attack the war rather than to offer constructive criticism to better fight the war is sad. That even some defenders of the war would go along with the proxy war on Rumsfeld is disturbing. But as long as our troops live up to their training and do their duty with a President who will press forward, this latest chorus of criticism will mean nothing in the long run.
While I remain puzzled that the public does not recognize how much we've done in the last two years and how remarkable that is historically, I can't change the fact that our public, encouraged by the media, thinks war is won easily based on the perfect plan.
Rumsfeld should stay. I will watch how he adds brigades to the Army because our line strength must increase, but I am willing to give his Pentagon the chance to add combat brigades without substantially adding new soldiers to the active Army.
We go to war with the expectations our nation has; not with the expectations that I might wish us to have.
