Victor Davis Hanson at Dartmouth:

The Dartmouth Review: Victor Davis Hanson v. Ronald Edsforth

After VDH made a considered and correct argument in support of the Iraq war he had to sit through the standard response of non sequiturs like

"By invading Iraq ... the United States has abandoned its own democratic ideology and gone “down the slippery slope to militarism” and become “willing to delegate to our commander in chief the powers of a king.”

and, of course, the Dartmouth prof. had to protest too much:

Professor Edsforth presented himself as a “peace activist” and not a pacifist—pacifists abhor all wars, while activists oppose some and support others. He approved of the 2001 Afghan campaign but not the attack on Serbia in 1999. He said “all war is mass murder” and that wars bring out man’s “instinct to kill, our delight in torture.

I always like it when somebody reveals something about their own proclivities by accusing others of them.
There was one pertinent response

Taking a rigorous [I'm sure the author of this piece meant staunch or the like] stand against preemptive war, Professor Edsforth said democracy is not something that can be forced onto a population—“it comes from within and it is unlikely to be imposed from without.” Instead, democracies can only form as they did recently in Ukraine, based on a popular uprising against the authoritarian leadership. Edsforth sought to apply this rule to Iraq, saying that Western powers should have simply awaited Saddam Hussein’s death and then formented [sic] revolution; this, he said, would be far less costly in blood and treasure. As a result of the coalition’s 2003 invasion, he said Iraq “is in no condition to function normally for years to come.”

I said that it was pertinent, not that it was worthwhile. This "democracy can not be imposed from without" argument is common too. What is interesting to me is that is exposes how deeply confused the Left is. Democracy by its very nature really can not be imposed at all. This is what Bush means when he says that Freedom is God's gift to all mankind. This is what our Founders meant by

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Of course, what they mean to say is that America should not impose Western values -- this is really just anti-western sentiment divorced from any real argument about politics or foreign policy.