Victor Davis Hanson does it again with this telling op-ed on "losing" Iraq:

The earlier conundrum put to rest by the rapidity of our victory insidiously resurfaced as it became clear that it was not a cost-free task for 140,000 Americans to institute democracy among 26 million Iraqis tyrannized for three decades. Newspaper pundits, NPR commentators, and Democratic aspirants, knowing nothing of the challenges of postwar Okinawa, the dilemma of ex-Nazis in occupied Germany, or the mess in 1946 Korea, implied that 60 American dead meant failure and a Chechnya-style inferno. Our soldiers' job, of course, was made no easier by the usual Arab mendacious fare broadcast freely into the country — Jews were now buying Iraqi land; Jewish troops were capitalizing on the occupation, Jews, Jews, Jews…Worse, still it was not only that our enemies wished us to fail, but our so-called friends in the region were equally apprehensive that the virus of democracy might well be contagious.