By the end of the war’s first week, the traditional media trotted out its favorite war term: quagmire. You’ll recall the frequent use of that word in late October 2001, just three weeks after the first bombs were dropped on the Taliban. A week later, the Taliban regime began its wholesale collapse in Afghanistan.

It took three weeks for the media to declare the Afghan war to a quagmire, but it took them only a week to make the same proclamation about the Iraq war. Although the media can’t claim credit for accuracy, they at least deserve a pat on the back for increasing the speed at which they’re wrong by a whopping 200%.

And here’s a tip for those of you who like to wager: if the United States should ever find itself in the unfortunate position of needing to fight another war, when the media starts turning up the volume on the Vietnam comparisons, place your money on victory being within view a week later.

(Some people are apparently unaware that Vietnam is the exception in American military history, not the rule.)

I have no relationship with Saddam.Mohammed Al-Douri
Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N.
9 April 2003

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.Bill Clinton

President of the United States
26 January 1998

Dean E. Murphy reports in New York Times that those who protested the war are now engaged in soul-searching induced by the recent American military successes.

In the wake of the Baghdad’s fall, one protester said, “I feel a lot of confusion and anxiety,” and “I think both sides are right.”

At the protests I attended, I don’t remember anyone willing to admit that President Bush’s position was the least bit correct. Now, after Saddam’s regime crumbled, not only is Bush right, but the protesters are as right as he is! Huh???

And in the New York Post, Mark Goldblatt writes, “the antiwar movement consists not of thinkers but of true believers; indeed, it’s more akin to a religious cult than a political cause, hoist on tenets of faith...”

Charles Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post: “This kind of war is totally new. We have, of course, destroyed totalitarian regimes in the past, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan most notably. But in World War II, we made war not just on the regime but on the whole country.”

In the New York Post, Ralph Peters says, “Saddam had a classic 20th-century, industrial-age war plan. But our forces fought a 21st-century, post-industrial war. [...] Far from technically incompetent, Saddam’s plan was right out of Clausewitz. Its models were the lessons of the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Soviet victory over the Germans in the Second World War.”

Lastly, in the Los Angeles Times, Victor Davis Hanson debunks the mistaken belief—apparently wide-spread in much of the world—that liberal democracies don’t have the stomach to fight wars effectively.

As Saddam’s statue fell, Some of the heaviest resistance in Iraq’s capital came from Baghdad University. Looks like Columbia has a little competition.