Iraq War Recalls Past U.S. Conflicts, Controversies

I am constantly sparring with people who think that conducting a war is so simple that only someone as stupid as George W. Bush could screw it up.

Most people are so focused on the "here and now" that they have absolutely no historical perspective by which to judge the challenges of our times.

Fortunately, Prof. Victor Davis Hanson has ample historical perpective to share with all of us:

Nothing in Iraq comes close to the furor over Korea, either. Again, suppose the following: President Bush conducts an ongoing public fight with the new commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who in turn serially whines to the press that he is being backstabbed by an unsupportive administration. Bush then fires Petraeus. The general returns to the United States to tickertape parades, while the president becomes even more detested as thousands more Americans are killed.

That scenario sums up the Truman-MacArthur row over the stalemate in Korea. During that conflict, President Truman fired Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson; fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his senior military commander in the theater; and faced calls for impeachment from U.S. senators, including the venerable Robert Taft. By February 1952, Truman's approval ratings had hit 22 percent - the lowest-known polls of any sitting U.S. president, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon included.

Read the whole thing.