They Learned Nothing and Forgot Nothing

[I just found this. It should have posted back on September 8th. But the mystery bug in Blogger that sometimes takes scheduled posts and turns them into drafts kicked in. I didn't notice that it failed to post. What a loss for the world, eh? What the heck, it is a timeless subject.]

Wow, the New York Times outdid itself in stupidity with their editorial on the formal end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They cannot forgive President Bush for leading us to victory in that war, remembering every error and inflating it to a crime, showing they remain ignorant of the chaos of war that defies planning for every contingency, and have forgotten the history that led us to war.

If you are determined to view our war effort as a defeat as the Times is, it is clearly possible to interpret the war as a series of crimes and blunders. But we really have won the war, and it was possible to see the trends as I did at the time and looking back after the surge broke Sunni Arab resistance, with a tip to Strategypage (which updates their piece here), in this post.

I don't mind people being defeatists. That's their right. But a decent grasp of the facts would make it less of a reflex action and more of a choice, don't you think? But having gotten away with reading the Vietnam War wrong all these decades, why should the defeatists choose analysis?