Lighten your heart with Victor Davis Hanson

I read a column the other day by a really idiotic writer who said, "it's like the kamikazes, an endless stream of insurgents." But there was not an endless stream of them in Japan. There was about 7,000 of them; that was it. Finally, at Okinawa, they had to get people inebriated and draft English majors by force out of the university. And at least 30% of them did not reach the target, because they turned back.

There's only a finite supply of people who want to kill themselves, and we've killed a lot of them, and they kill themselves. That's helped. More importantly, we sent a message to the Iraqis. We've sent a message to the Iraqis and to the insurgents that we're not going to leave. John McCain is over there, for all of the controversies that surround him -- he does get the image across that he's a little crazy, and he does not want to leave in defeat.

And now suddenly, the approval - I just saw the latest polls - 53% do not want a withdrawal, as the Democrats suggest. That's not unusual. If we were talking right now in the midst of the U.S. Civil War, it would have been almost exactly the same.

In February of 1862 or March of 1862, after Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson were taken, Ulysses S. Grant, the Petraeus of that era, would have been considered a genius. And this was a great idea - you could not let a separate Confederate nation exist side-by-side to a free, non-slaveholding North. Had you had this same conversation April 8th, a day after the Battle of Shiloh - a battle in which the Union and Confederate armies suffered more dead and wounded than every battle in the history of the republic from its inception in 1776, people had turned on the war. If we had had the conversation nearly a year later, July 5th, 1863, with that brilliant victory of Grant at Vicksburg and Meade at Gettysburg, suddenly you couldn't find anybody who had not been for that war all along.

If you fast-forward another year to that horrendous summer of 1864, when the North knew that it was one thing to repel a Southern invader and quite another to take and occupy a country the size of Western Europe, especially when that country had some of the best cavalry officers in the history of civilized warfare, and men like Nathan Bedford Forrest - but anyway, if you'd looked at that summer, think of it - Cold Harbor, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania - in that period of 90 days, the army of the Potomac was essentially wrecked, destroyed - 100,000 casualties. And you had Horace Greeley and other Northern opportunists saying the problem was not that Lincoln was going to lose to McClellan; it was that he shouldn't even run for reelection.

Whatever we think - this is what gets somebody fired at any university in the United States - the truth is, if you talk to somebody in the Middle East and they see the United States not only believes in something, but is crazy enough to defend it, it is a less likely, not a more likely, target.