The naysayers: today's variety sound wearyingly familiar.

FOR nearly three years we have witnessed a steady stream of invective that American policy in the Middle East is amoral, impractical, or doomed to failure. The recent democratic aftershocks in Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, which followed from the elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, have sent formerly critical pundits and diplomats scrambling for cover. As interesting as the about-faces of the New York Times et al. are, we should not forget that the domestic criticism of American efforts has long roots in our past, but little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq.

Take, for example, the blame-America-first line. Some on the hard left sought to blame September 11 on our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams, in which women were secluded, homosexuals killed, Jews terrorized, non-Muslims routed, and freedoms squelched, registered little--even though this vision was at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.

This flawed idea that autocrats hate democracy more for what it does than what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II, isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and had wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in the Germans' past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized and impoverished German people. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo-American imperialists.

By the late 1940s things on the ground had changed somewhat, and the blame-America-first ideology adjusted accordingly. Now it was the turn of the old Left, which castigated "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of Red China: We were told ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao really wanted to cultivate American friendship but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues--as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more of his own people murdered and starved.

Ditto the reactions to the animosity from such dictators as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians, whose olive branches were crushed by unimaginative Cold Warriors and who only then went on to plan their gulags. Few seemed to think it natural that a free and powerful America would be hated by fascists and Communists--much less that it should be praised rather than castigated for earning such hatred.

SUPERSTITION AFTER SUPERSTITION

A second line of criticism maintains, again wrongly, that Americans are essentially weak. Before we went into Afghanistan, the Bush administration was hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made an American military victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. Then the opposition resurfaced to assure us that Iraq was lost, only to grow quiet again after the Iraqi election and its regional aftershocks--a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan. Only America, it seems, can be an overweening bully and a pitiful helpless giant at nearly the same time.

Now a new geopolitical litany of gloom has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in Iraq; we took our "eye off bin Laden"; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; and so on.

Such pessimism is also nothing new. In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a shadow of a military force. Yet by late 1918, seasoned doughboys were chasing Prussians out of Belgium. On the eve of World War II Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering's generals to warn us that the ultra-modern Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles, as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.

Japanese Zeros, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "turkey shoots" by 1944, as American Hellcats and Corsairs blew them out of the skies. Later, Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia--even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. In short, the American military and economy has been habitually underestimated in the 20th century, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.

Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, petroleum boycotts, the "energy crisis," nuclear "meltdowns," and all the other bogeymen prophesied to overwhelm the strength of the American state and people. We have met the "population bomb," "imperial overstretch," "Japan, Inc.," and the EU's "third way"--and we have come out just fine, thank you.

Still another line of criticism overestimates our enemies' strength. When suicide murderers dominated the news of the intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?

That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, building the fence, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner, few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, a historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.

So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of draftees who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German Imperial Army of World War I may have fielded the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.

The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression fight the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than engrained Hitler-worship and death-cult discipline? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years.

Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie celebration of death. But the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed. They destroyed not just the death pilots but the very culture that launched them. In the end, Japanese militarists were shanghaiing English majors out of their universities and plying them with drink to fill out the eroding ranks of the "Divine Wind" and "Floating Chrysanthemums."

Finally, misguided pessimists claim that the United States is alone in the world. When George W. Bush orchestrated the fall of Saddam Hussein he was said to have alienated everyone, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers. Indeed, the June 1941 invasion of Russia was about as multilateral as could be, with Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, Italians, and Finns all joining the invading armies of the Third Reich.

By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe, as former defeated fascists became friends and once-allied neutrals and Communists turned hostile. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao, while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarkes and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberation" movements.

SELF-CRITICISM VS. SELF-DELUSION

Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique. Our successes in creating an affluent and free citizenry only raise the bar higher, as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth--and with a little more education or money could walk like gods rather than crawl as men.

There are also some among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. These zealots harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the fanatic in pursuit of a utopian cause. Sen. Patty Murray, after all, once lectured the United States that it must emulate the good works of a bin Laden to better capture the hearts and minds of the Afghan people--as if such people always gravitate to the purity of a terrorist fanatic rather than to the slow work of democracy.

Finally, the intellectual class we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from what makes America work, and especially from the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation for the fact that the otherwise normal-looking soldiers of the U.S. Marine Corps are far more deadly than the robed and masked Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants--and that a fleet of Americans with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East can do in a year.

It is wise to cite and even publicize our errors, and there have been many in this war, from the failure to secure the borders of Iraq and the disbanding of the Iraqi army to the first pullback from Fallujah and the delay in holding a plebiscite. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well, since much of what transpires in war is impossible to predict and victory goes to those who make the fewest mistakes. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.

But nor should we fall into our current pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, liberated 50 million Afghans and Iraqis, scattered al-Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world--so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story that terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is on the horizon. So let us ignore this American gloominess that is hardly novel but apparently innate to our public discourse. If the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.

A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros--perhaps even Hillary herself--will quietly come to appreciate what President Bush is attempting in the Middle East, as they begin to fathom that support for removing fascists and replacing them with democratic governments is always a good and noble thing and should not be mitigated by occasional setbacks and disappointments. In short, we are witnessing a great moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that was just the sort of thing that everyone was sort of for, sort of all along--sort of . . .

Mr. Hanson is the author of A War Like No Other, forthcoming from Random House this summer.