VDH "We are not winning"

I don't think we need to fight the Vietnam war again. We lost, but the reason we lost is that the American people were not behind the kind of effort that would have been necessary to win.

That is one of my criticisms of this war: a lack of leadership to galvanize the American people to the long term project that this must be.

I can come up with several realpolitik explanations for why this war is necessary. I do not buy the "democracy building" argument.

Interesting to me, that not only have several conservatives now explicitly thrown in the towel, but another, V. D. Hanson, is retracting his "We are Winning" rhetoric and going more for a long slog of managing chaotic change, which, in fact, I think is the right approach. We don't really want a Saddam Lite in Iraq, but we may end up with something similar, but a bit more open-ended. And that'll do.

There's an interesting Link to VD Hanson's first article after 9/11, I believe. An interesting parallel.

I believe that VDH thinks we are not winning is primarilly because his predictions never came true in the first article.