The American Spectator

Critics claim that the war in Iraq is pointless, that U.S. military involvement there can neither discourage terrorism nor promote democracy. Yet was America ever involved in any conflict more pointless than World War I? Though the Allies won the war, they botched the peace, and the “war to end all wars” proved merely a prelude to (indeed, some would say, the essential cause of) the horrors of World War II.

“The causes of war are always falsely represented, its honour dishonest and its glory meretricious,” wrote Vera Brittain, who lost not only her fiancé but two close friends and her only brother in World War I, a war in which nearly 750,000 British troops were killed.

Whatever false representations preceded the war in Iraq, and whether or not the U.S. presence there can bring lasting peace to that volatile region, our troops now fighting terrorist insurgents still possess the same “bold vigor” that so impressed Vera Brittain. For such incomparable warriors, the suggestion of American withdrawal still deserves the same response it got in 1918: “Retreat, hell!”