Friday

Victor Davis Hanson notes that critics of the war are desperate for it to be like Vietnam, but it is a really bad idea:

Do we really wish to continue the tired formula, since we know what follows and where it ends?

Once we leave, the killing starts in earnest, not 20 or 30 per day, but wholesale slaughter of any Iraqis who taught school, or were clean shaven and wore Western dress, or fought to save Iraq. Millions of refugees flee to the West. Those who stay are killed or “reeducated.” Islamism, like Communism, is empowered with the American defeat. We can expect, as in the past, new aggression in peripheral theaters like Afghanistan or Israel. Twenty years from now expect revisionist books reminding us that the battles for Iraq, like Tet, were American victories and the enemy was almost beaten when we quit. Envision one of the late al-Zarqawi's henchmen, like General Giap, in his dotage thanking the antiwar movement.

Americans abroad will be ripe targets, since, like the Iranian hostage taking of 1979, there will be an unspoken assurance that the United States would not dare risk another Iraq/Vietnam. Here at home, we will enter an endless cycle of mutual recrimination, lose confidence in the U.S. military, and return to a neo-isolationism—punctuated by the occasional liberal call “to do something” as we watch the usual associated horrors unfold around the world.

And Jonah Goldberg discusses our neighbors to the north:

Canada is arguably the most deluded industrialized nation in the world. Because elite Canadians think the U.S. is the font of the world’s problems, they think being different than the U.S. and sucking up to the United Nations will buy them grace on the cheap. They claim to be “a nation of peacekeepers,” but they rank 50th among U.N. peacekeeper nations in the number of troops sent. They’ve bravely contributed to the war in Afghanistan, where 2,300 troops still serve, but refused to join the effort in Iraq, believing that jihadists would honor such fine distinctions. That was awfully nice of them. Too bad nice has nothing to do with it.