The Greatest Generalization

The November issue of Liberty magazine is now out with my article, "The Greatest Generalization," about the tendency of some in the War Party -- I pick on Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson -- to compare the Iraq War to World War II. It is not available on the web so here is a sample:

It is easy to see why Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson and others (a few minutes with Google will turn up plenty) force the Iraq War into an ill-fitting WWII template. For all the death, destruction and dubious results, the allies vanquished two of the most dangerous regimes of modern times and midwifed prosperous and peaceful countries in Germany and Japan.
Adolf Hitler particularly stands out, both as a figure of pure evil and as a menace on an epic scale. the Fuhrer's armies swept Europe from the Paris to Moscow and from the Norwegian Tundra to the North African Desert. His U-boats and pocket battleships menaced allied shipping from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean.
But Saddam Hussein was no Hitler and the Republican Guard and Fedayeen Saddam were not the SS. If the emptiness of Saddam's "threat" wasn't obvious when his armies caved almost instantly in two wars with the United States, it should have been by the time he chose a humiliating capture and an almost certain execution instead of putting a Lugar in his mouth.