…talking points is that the Iraq war has already taken longer than it took to vanquish Hitler in World War II. Nancy Pelosi repeats it here. A couple of things: First, WWII was a conventional war, and unconventional wars are almost always drawn out affairs (counter-insurgency guru David Galula: “To date, there has never been an early collapse of an insurgency”). Two, the combat in World War II was obviously much more intense–400,000 Americans killed, as opposed to 3,000 in Iraq. Three, setting an arbitrary standard of four years for any U.S. conflict would be folly. By that standard, we’d have to quit Afghanistan as well as Iraq, since the Afghan war has been going on not only longer than WWII, but longer than the Iraq war.