Power, embedded in deep cynicism

A very good article (yes, another one) from Victor Davis Hanson on eight assumptions made by both "original critics and the mea culpa recent converts". As always, he is able to provide the historical perspective without which we become like squabbling children. Among much else:

Had the British and Americans quit in 1943 — after Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the Kasserine Pass, Tobruk, and other assorted disasters — then the carnage of 1939 to 1943 would have properly been seen as a tragedy that led not to emergence of a free Europe and a reborn Japan, but as needless sacrifice against the unstoppable juggernaut of Asian and German fascism.

He ends with this question.

Can Western enlightenment and power, embedded in deep cynicism, still prevail over ignorance and self-inflicted pathology energized by fanaticism?