Victor Davis Hanson provides the historical perspective so sorely lacking from most discourse about the Iraq War. I run out of superlatives to describe VDH’s important work, but this essay is really exceptional: History’s Verdict.

Generals Eisenhower and Bradley probably miscalculated German intentions at Argentan, and thus allowed thousands of veteran Germans to escape the Falaise Gap in August. Tens of thousands of these reprieved Panzers would regroup to kill thousands more Americans later that year. Whom to blame?

The subsequent Battle of the Bulge was a result of a colossal American intelligence failure. Somehow 250,000 Nazis, right under the noses of the Americans, were able to mount a counteroffensive with absolute surprise. For all of our own failure to account for the missing WMD, so far an enemy army of 250,000 has not, as it once did in December 1945, assembled unnoticed a few miles from our theater base camps. Whom to blame?

We know about the horrific German massacres of American prisoners, but little about instances of Americans’ shooting German captives well before the Battle of the Bulge. Such murdering was neither sanctioned by American generals nor routine — but nevertheless it was not uncommon in the heat of battle and the stress of war. No inquiry cited Generals Hodges, Patton, or Bradley as responsible for rogue soldiers shooting unarmed prisoners. Whom to blame?

The catastrophes did not end after the Normandy campaign. More Americans were killed between December 1944 and January 1945 — when we wrongly pushed back the bulge by confronting it head-on rather than slicing it off far to its rear — than all those lost previously in the months since the D-Day landings. Germans had heavy overcoats and white camouflage; GIs froze and were easy targets in the snow with their dark uniforms. Whom to blame?

I could go on, but the point is clear. War is a horrendous experience in which the side that wins commits the fewest mistakes, rather than no errors at all.

This is just a taste. Read it all.