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Horse's Mouth: Washington Post Scrapes Bottom of Barrel to Find People Who Think War Isn't 'Lost' (4/29/07) by Greg Sargent

A Talking Points Memo blog points out that the only people who the Washington Post found saying "no" to the question of whether the Iraq war is lost were the U.S. national security advisor, the guy who came up with the "surge" in the first place and Victor Davis Hanson, a "military historian" at the Hoover Institution. Look what this "historian" had to say by email to the Post:
No: The war is not lost—no more than it was in winter 1776, July 1864, December 1945 or November 1950. The challenge is winning back hearts and minds at home, rather than in Iraq, where brave thousands join us each day to fight an evil sort the likes of which we haven't seen in recent memory.

Even if it slipped the historian's mind, someone at the Washington Post should have remembered that World War II had ended by December 1945 (and the Cold War hadn't even started yet). Hanson probably means December 1944, which was the Battle of the Bulge, but no one thought the Battle of the Bulge meant that Germany was going to win the war.

July 1864 is almost as wacky as a choice for the darkest days of the Civil War: In that month, Grant was besieging Lee at Petersburg--where he would be trapped for virtually the remainder of the war--and Sherman was surrounding Atlanta in preparation for burning it. Things were looking incredibly bleak for the Confederacy at that point—and sure enough, they were bleak.

Not much happened in the winter of 1775-76, and the biggest event in the winter of 1776-77 was Washington's victory at Trenton; Hanson is probably referring to Valley Forge—actually the winter of 1777-78—since this is the official U.S. metaphor for toughing it out when things look grim.

He gets November 1950 right as the date when China entered the Korean War, but it's not a great choice for making an always-darkest-before-the-dawn argument—the U.S. and its allies would never retake much of the territory that they lost in November and December of 1950.

They say that those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it. Maybe Hanson should have repeated it—in summer school.

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