Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Almost daily over the last four months we were told that Moammar Qaddafi was about ready to throw in the towel and give up.

Libya, after all, is not a distant Afghanistan or Iraq with a population of some 30 million. Yet this tiny police state of less than 7 million people, conveniently located on the Mediterranean Sea opposite nearby Europe, continues to thwart the three great powers of the NATO alliance and thousands of “Arab Spring” rebels.

In March, President Obama ordered the use of American bombers and cruise missiles to join with the French and British to finish off the tottering Qaddafi regime. Obama was apparently stung by liberal criticism that the U.S. had done little to help the rebels in their weeks-long effort to remove Qaddafi — after only belatedly supporting the successful revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt....