Two articles worth noting from Victor Davis Hanson:
Bomb, Occupy, or Neither?
Blowing apart a problem for a while is different from ending it for good.Wars usually end only when the defeated aggressor believes it would be futile to resume the conflict. Lasting peace follows if the loser is then forced to change its political system into something other than what it was.
Republican Rome learned that bitter lesson through three conflicts with Carthage before ensuring that there was not going to be a fourth Punic War.
Germany fought three aggressive wars before it was finally defeated, occupied, and reinvented.
America defeated Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, inflicting such damage that they were all unable to continue their resistance. And then, unlike its quick retreat home after World War I, America occupied — and still has bases in — all three.
Does anyone believe that Japan, Italy, and Germany would now be allies of the U.S. had the Truman administration removed all American military bases from those countries by 1948?
Read more: National Review
Iraq Was Then, Syria Is Now
Obama hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, but at least he isn’t George W. Bush.The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war.
The October 2002 joint congressional authorization to go to war was not just about fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Other worries prompted broad bipartisan support for the resolution. A majority of Democratic senators (as evidenced by their passionate speeches from the Senate floor) cited many of the resolution’s 23 writs. The latter were mostly concerned with things other than WMD: harboring terrorists, offering bounties for suicide bombers, giving refuge to at least one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects, committing genocide, attempting to kill a former U.S. president, and so on. Hillary Clinton should watch her own 2002 speech from the Senate floor.
Read more: National Review
