Iraq - Monday must read

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO's resident military historian has a new essay up. "The Iraqi Wars: Our 15-year conflict with Iraq."

I don't want to steal Hanson's thunder, but I want to note his opening,

Iraq is a blur now... The public can't quite separate Baathists from jihadists, Shiite from Sunni, or one coalition from another. Mostly the confusion arises because we have compressed four separate wars of two decades into some vague continuum.

Pro- and anti-war activists tend to have all the facts straight (we just downplay the ones we don't like.) VDH has done what I didn't think possible. He's written a short, concise, truly neutral analysis of Iraq.

He concludes,

But at least this final war in its ambitious goal to end the cycle is honest, and so will be decisive in the way the other three were not.

We will either win or lose, but we won't be back a fifth time.