It’s Friday, which means another great read from Victor Davis Hanson, providing a much needed counterbalance to the loony left’s and the media’s relentless search for signs of defeat in Iraq: Our Summer of Discontent?

If we were losing 20 or so soldiers a day in the manner of a Chechnya, and if thousands were entering Iraq daily, we should have cause for worry. If a nuclear-armed Russia or China — or even Pakistan — suddenly decided to send troops or arms, we would be in real trouble. If Iraqis fawned over Saddam’s picture as the Vietnamese once did with Uncle Ho, things could look bleak. And if our universities were on strike, our streets shut down in moratoria, and the Democrats mobilizing to cut off aid to CENTCOM — then we might well lose public support for Iraq.

Yes, there is growing anger in America. But unlike in Vietnam, it is not directed at the Pentagon or at the military or at our supporters (such as the Kurds), but rather at the Iraqi street itself. The danger is not — as was true in the 1960s, when our own naïve youth reconceived hard-core Stalinist Vietnamese as romantic utopians — that we will be mesmerized by the Fedeyeen. No, the worry is instead that the ingratitude shown by a few vocal Iraqi opportunists could convince too many of us that the entire country is simply not worth an iota of our blood and treasure.

A shopkeeper in Baghdad spinning conspiracy theories to CNN, spewing hatred of the Jews, and whining about his air-conditioning during a three-hour coffee break is nothing like the romantic figure of a peasant in a Vietnamese rice paddy expressing hope for land reform and freedom from commissars. As we know from the general post-9/11 climate, the ingratitude — coupled with an obnoxious envy — so endemic in the Middle East proves especially grating to Americans.