It’s Friday, the day when Victor Davis Hanson usually files a new column, and today’s is a good one: Thicker than Oil.

A year ago, almost no one claimed that we were far too na�ve, idealistic, or stupid. No, Americans were forever conniving and larcenous. Remember the invective about perpetual American intervention? Tens of thousands of our troops poured into the Middle East after the “excuse” of September 11. Right-wingers alleged that we had turned from republic to a garrison empire in a new global ego trip. Leftists assured us that we were greedy colonialists replicating the British raj — perhaps keen to corner the Iraqi date market or exploit at slave wages the skilled workforce around Tikrit. Arab fundamentalists prattled on about the American Crusaders and Zionists out to steal holy lands and desecrate shrines — no doubt convinced that Billy Grahamites, if not blowing up ancient Buddhist statuary, would soon be attaching crosses to minarets.

Yet since the very day the war started, the reality has been just the opposite — a constant desire for the bare-minimum amount of troops abroad in as brief a deployment as possible. More sober military observers have always fathomed that the dangers of the American campaign were never that we were overrunning the Middle East in hope of perennial occupation. Instead we — as amateur interventionists who have always had a very short attention span — had too few troops to fight the war, and fewer still to rebuild the country.

Even the chief, albeit private, worry of most Iraqis was mostly that there were not enough American infidels to provide them security and that we would leave too soon — hardly the response one would expect to old-style, foreign, pith-helmeted imperialists who had stayed too long.