Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO column is up and, as usual, he places the calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation or firing in the proper perspective:

The idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Rumsfeld — and now Richard Meyers! — should step down, in the midst of a global war, for the excesses and criminality of a handful of miscreant guards and their lax immediate superiors in the cauldron of Iraq is absurd and depressing all at once.
What would we think now if George Marshall had been forced out on news that 3,000 miles away George S. Patton’s men had shot some Italian prisoners, or Gen. Hodges’s soldiers summarily executed German commandoes out of uniform, or drivers of the Red Ball express had raped French women? Should Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell have been relieved from his command for the February 12-13, 1991, nocturnal bombing of the Al Firdos compound in Baghdad, in which hundreds of women and children of Baathist loyalists were tragically incinerated and pictures of their corpses broadcast around the world, prompting the United States to cease all further pre-planned and approved attacks on the elite in Saddam’s bunkers throughout Baghdad? Of course not.

Rumsfeld and Meyers have presided over two amazingly successful wars. In an aggregate of 11 weeks, and at the tragic cost of 700 combat dead, the American military defeated the two worst regimes in the Middle East and stayed on to implant democratic change where no such idea has ever existed. Had anyone envisioned, say in 1999, that the United States could do such a thing — that Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar would both be out of power, and that governing councils would be there in their place — he would have been dismissed as unhinged. What they are attempting to do is not to keep some psychopath “in his box” or lob over cruise missiles. The latter are palliative but ultimately solely punitive measures that kill a few hundred or thousand anonymous Middle Easterners and keep the nasty business off the evening news, thus in the long term inciting rather than solving the problem.

Then, VDH turns to Rumsfeld’s record:

Have we forgotten the world before September 11? It was not all certain that going to Afghanistan was preordained, much less the rapid fall of the Taliban ? reread the use of “quagmire” and its kindred language of doom after the first few weeks of war by experts on the New York Times opinion pages. Those on the left said victory was impossible; those on the right said we were losing due to far too few troops. . .
Yet Rumsfeld’s Special Forces and air power really did win the war, and Afghanistan is now more secure with far fewer troops than is Iraq. A new policy toward North Korea; a mature sobriety about the post-Cold War European hypocrisy of wanting continued protection without even the simulacra of responsible partnership; a new honesty with South Korea ? all this is due largely to Donald Rumsfeld. Add the Libyan turn-around, Dr. Khan’s confessions, troops out of Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian worry about new scrutiny ? all dividends from his acceptance of the world as it is rather than what we used to dream it to be. The Democratic leadership asking for his scalp should spell out exactly how the U.N. representative in Iraq is not de facto U.N. participation, how the paltry NATO contingent in Afghanistan is proof that Europe will help if asked to join a truly multilateral coalition, and what exactly they would have done differently in the war that the vast majority of them voted for and funded.

And finally, Professor Hanson, who is a registered Democrat, has these words for the leaders of his party:

One final jarring scene from the televised spectacles was the image of the lone, beleaguered Joe Lieberman calling for patience and sobriety, and worried about our troops in the field and the pulse of the war. This decent and honest man reminds us of what the present party of Ted Kennedy and Terry McAuliffe used to be. The confidence of a Truman, JFK, and Scoop Jackson ? caricatured now for dropping the bomb, a fiery “pay-any-price” speech, and heating up the Cold War ? is now nowhere to be found.
This is a vital point, because either this year or sometime in the next decade a Democratic administration may well take the reins of power and in matters of national security it will be far to the left of the Liebermans of the world. And the disturbing events that we saw in the 1990s ? constant appeasement of Middle East terrorists and their national sponsors, the emergence of a nuclear Pakistan and North Korea, sudden withdrawal from messy places like Mogadishu, a jetting special envoy Jimmy Carter ? will return, though made worse through the prism of the present fury over Iraq.
If it were not so tragic it would be ironic to see what the present prescient critics are going to say ? much less do ? when they confront the hideous reality that Iran and perhaps Syria will have acquired nuclear weapons and with them the ability, without a neighboring nuclear India staring them down, to blackmail most of the Middle East and the oil-hungry world at large.
We will soon learn what Middle Eastern nuclear honor, atomic loss of face, or radioactive jihad really means. Most who now damn unilateralism and preemption won’t find their beloved but shaken U.N., EU, or NATO at their side. More likely there will come a day when in exasperation they will call up someone like Don Rumsfeld for advice ? albeit in silence and off the record.