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A thought-provoking article, and many thanks for posting it. The American public's behavior hasn't changed since it became the American public. One thing that Grant, Lee, and Sherman all could agree on was a contempt for the reporters and editors who daily judged them and found them wanting. Patton was famously drawn as a Nazi in an editorial cartoon. The downside to having a free press is that it is populated mostly by scoundrels, sensationalists, and incompetents posing as experts, all of whom have an agenda that differs markedly from that of the war effort.

That is exacerbated by a late-20th-century internationalist political enthusiasm emanating from Europe but with its hooks firmly implanted in the soft belly of American intellectual life. Here the idea is that free expression consists exclusively of criticism of one's own society and that an infallible sign of free thinking is open sympathy with the enemy. Its proponents are not particularly bright but are passionate, articulate, and oh so very stylish. Exactly how it was that journalists became convinced that they were intelligentsia is a little obscure - frankly, they're among the stupidest and most ill-informed people I have ever met. If one can accomplish something in life, fine; if not, one can always write about it and criticize it (or, as long as we're on the topic of social parasites, portray it on the screen or stage. How it was that actors and popular musicians became convinced they were intelligentsia is quite beyond my imagination.)

All of this ought to be independent of events in the field and until after the fact, is so. That a clear victory (Tet, anyone?) may be judged a defeat in retrospect is not simply a phenomenon of modern communications and social perception, it is an unforgivable betrayal of the first order. There I do not think Hanson is quite hard enough on the perpetrators. We don't hang them these days, which is accounted a sign of civilization, but there are occasions where I wonder if those doing the accounting don't have a vested interest and that perhaps being that sort of civilized isn't a very questionable virtue.

In any case, the gobblers and the warblers are now engaged in the dishonorable effort to pull defeat from the jaws of victory so that they do not have to admit that they were mistaken. Whether General Lee actually said it or not (and the preponderance of evidence is that he did), he should have: "...it appears that we appointed all our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all our best generals to edit the newspapers."

VDH nails it as usual. One point though, about the WMDs. We found prohibited weapons and programs, just not in the quantities that we knew he had. Where are they? We know the lefties take saddam at his word that he destroyed them in the desert and doesn't remember where. We know, of course, that they are in iran and syria.

Also remember that Oil For Food is not what you fry your fish and chips in. It had gutted the sanctions and saddam was just waiting for a compliant un to drop all charade of enforcement. Then he would enrich the uranium that the US took out of iraq under protest from the un, using parts and plans for centrifuges and weapons that our Forces found and set off a nuke on a ship in NY harbor.