Pity the poor students at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Or at least that subset who take classes form Victor Davis Hanson, whose column “Remember the Whole Lesson of Past Tragedy” appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 1.

In that column Hanson, by way of cautioning against glib comparisons between the Iraq quagmire and the Vietnam quagmire, suggests that the primary lesson to be learned is that when the U.S. withdraws from ill-advised wars, the local population suffers.

Of course, the real lesson is that when the U.S. government begins protracted military involvement under false pretexts (The Gulf of Tonkin incident for Vietnam, WMD and terrorism for Iraq), the public eventually catches on and demands that we withdraw.

This is the fundamental problem with Bush’s Iraq policy: We still really haven’t been told why he did it. And we know that the reasons and cost estimates we given were a combination of deliberate falsehoods and incompetence.

The American people want to do the right thing, and are willing to pay a high price to do it. But it’s becoming clear to a growing number of Americans that we have been led into a bad situation by deceitful incompetents.