In War: Resolution.

• Author: Davis Hanson, Victor
• Position: Viewpoint essay

"What is missing from the national debate over [the Iraq War]," laments Victor Davis Hanson in the Claremont Review of Books, "is any appreciation of past American military errors...that nearly cost us victory in far more important wars." This "historical amnesia," he writes, is undermining our ability to "reestablish our wartime objective as victory."

Hanson, a prolific military historian and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, reviews previous U.S. intelligence failures (Pearl Harbor, the outbreak of the Korean War and subsequent Chinese intervention, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Germany's Ardennes offensive in December 1944, Okinawa), diplomatic blunders (Dean Acheson's exclusion of Korea from our defense perimeter in Asia, a U.S. diplomat's apparent unconcern about Saddam Hussein's intention to invade Kuwait), strategic and tactical errors (daylight bombing raids over Europe and the initial decision not to use convoys to escort merchant ships in WWII, repeated Union attacks on entrenched Confederate positions, the failure to plan for hedgerow fighting after D-Day), military un-preparedness (inferior weapons in WWI and early in...