How the Iraq War is like the American Civil War

President George W. Bush, it is said, is a voracious reader of history. This fact is quite a variance, by the way, at the image of the brainless, drunken frat boy that his enemies like to comfort themselves with. In any case, the President must be deriving comfort at the prospect of history repeating itself.

What history repeating what? Let's go back to another war, which was being fought over a hundred and forty years ago. As with Iraq, there were innumerable people, in the press and in politics, who had sadly concluded that war was already lost and had started to demand that it be brought to an "honorable" end. Then as now the President was considered very unpopular. So unpopular that, it being an election year, most pundits at the time confidently predicted that he would be defeated by his war hero opponent, one General George B. McClellan.

Even though the war ground on without an end in sight, with casualties mounting, that other President persisted in pursuing a strategy that he insisted would bring about eventual victory. Hardly anyone, including many in his own cabinet, shared that President's optimism.

For those readers who are a little history impaired, that war was the American Civil War and that President was Abraham Lincoln.

So how was it that Abraham Lincoln turned out to be right and his critics wrong? For Lincoln it was the singular event of the fall of Atlanta, Georgia, then a major supply depot and railroad nexus for the Confederacy. General William Tecumseh Sherman had painstakingly maneuvered his army through northern Georgia for months, slowly but surely cutting off Atlanta from the rest of the Confederacy. Finally, Confederate General John Bell Hood was forced to abandon the city. Atlanta fell on September 2^nd, 1864.

President Lincoln's popularity soared over night. He handily won reelection and a mandate to win the Civil War, which he finally did the following April.