Judging a war in progress can be a hazardous undertaking. Jeff Jacoby in an insightful article argues against those who say that we were wrong to go to war in Iraq based on the difficulties we have encountered. He cites the difficulties encountered in the War of 1812, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Civil War as examples we need to keep in mind lest we be guilty of judging the Iraqi war prematurely. He concludes:
The point isn't that the violent mess in Iraq today is analogous to the Civil War in 1863, or to the Ardennes in 1944, or to the burning of Washington in 1814. The point is that we don't know. Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched.