America at war: History vs. Saddam

Vice President Dick Cheney predicts Iraq will wax dangerously as time wears on, prompting his warning that "time is not on our side."

In his view, regime change and the subsequent nation-building should be undertaken sooner rather than later. Either you extrapolate from what we know of Saddam Hussein and say he must be ousted — not a stretch of intuition or logic — or you wait and see. Many do not wish to risk the wait.

With regard to Osama bin Laden, for example, the Clinton administration was pleased to malinger. Bill Clinton's repeated demonstrations of executive flaccidity in the face of terrorism — and their nexus to the events of Sept. 11 — are how history can teach us.

Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, writes in The American Enterprise that history texts on the college level are typically liberal and do not take warmly to the Reagan years.

One focuses on the deficits (barely equal to Kennedy's or Truman's and dwarfed by Roosevelt as a portion of national economic output, he says) rather than Reagan's consummate contribution to peace, the defeat of the Soviet Union, and victory in the Cold War.

With exquisitely managed military, economic and philosophical pressure, Reagan brought about regime change and the meltdown of the Iron Curtain. He did not wait and see. He acted. (No, he did not go to "hot" war against the Soviets; that opportunity had been squandered decades earlier.)

If the syllabus of American history is written as an exercise in polemic disorientation, young Americans will not learn the true lessons of history.

One of those teaches that Saddam must go — sooner rather than later. The question of the hour remains — how ?