Victor Davis Hanson’s latest National Review Online op-ed is online. As usual, the entire piece is well worth reading, and Professor Davis concludes with the following observation:

Indeed, we are in one of the rare periods of fundamental transformation in world history ? as the United States has pledged its blood and treasure in both a dangerous and daring attempt to bring the Middle East, kicking and screaming, into the family of democratic nations and free societies. So while American soldiers fight, build, patrol, and sometimes die in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world at large ? the Saudi royal family, President Musharraf, Mr. Khaddafi, the mullahs in Iran, the young Assad, the kleptocracy on the West Bank, and the weak and triangulating Europeans ? wonders whether the strong horse will prove to be the murderous bin Laden and his Arab romance of a new Dark Age, or George Bush’s idea of a free and democratic Middle East.