From a military guy:

Dear Jonah,
The favorite indoor outdoor sport of public intellectuals these days is of course the historical analogy. Iran is the new Germany and this is 1938. Bin Ladin is the new Saladin and this the 12th Century or whatever. A new one dawned on me yesterday. I am currently reading a book called Through German Eyes: The English on the Somme. The author has gone back and read German unit histories and intelligence reports and tried to write a history of the battle as the German’s saw it. What emerges is the whole myth of an incompetent British leadership sending lambs to slaughter is not true at all. Looked at from the German perspective, the British Army was actually very good on the Somme. They nearly broke the German Army.
The reason why this reminded me of today is that people continually refuse to understand that some fights are just hard. The British Army in 1916 was facing an industrialized well trained German Army that was occupying the better part of France and was simply not going to quit. All of the arm chair post facto strategizing in the world is not going to change the brutal reality that the English could either give up and loose the war or fight and win the war and suffer incredible casualties. There was no easy way out.
Today, we face in many ways the same situation. We face a fanatical and cunning enemy who is unafraid to blend into our society indiscriminately kill civilians, is numerous, well funded and like the Germans will not give up. There is no good way out of this. The United States is going to spend the next generation or more under the threat of terrorism. It will have to change its society and its notions of civil liberties and privacy and will probably have to invade and occupy the odd country every few years for the foreseeable future. All of the arm chair strategizing about more troops in Iraq and Special Forces and diplomacy and working with our allies is not going to change that. People just refuse to face a bad reality. A bad situation is always someone’s fault for not pursuing the easy solution. People refuse to accept that sometimes there are no easy solutions. In the same way people refused even after the war to see that the slaughter on the Somme and Ypres was unavoidable once the war started, people today refuse to see that a long protracted bloody struggle against radical Islam is inevitable. Thus we get “Bush’s incompetence” and “why do they hate us” and so fourth. It is just the same monkeys in different trees.