The excellent Victor Davis Hanson, writing in The National Review:

The tired voices of past criticism are now using the present pause in the war to postulate another American predicament. Oddly, learning nothing from the immediate past, they are beginning now to advance a second-generation of pessimistic prognostications. These new myths are as fallacious as were their earlier parent legends about the Afghan winter, the Arab street, the sanctity of Ramadan, and so on.

Now we are told an attack against Iraq will supposedly inflame the Muslim world. Toppling Saddam Hussein will cause irreparable rifts with the Europeans and our moderate allies, and turn world opinion against America. Almost all these identical arguments were used against our decision to bomb the Taliban. Earlier in the campaign against Milosevic, we were likewise once warned that public opinion in the Orthodox states