A story around the camps in World War II was of a fighter pilot who got stranded at a bomber base for a week or so and who finally persuaded the base commander to loan him a bomber to fly himself back to his fighter base.

He roared down the runway on take-off, reached flying speed and retracted the gear. But things went wrong: Instead of streaking up into the sky as fighters do, the heavy bomber sunk down toward the earth and its propellers chewed into the runway.

Frantically the tower radioed him, “Come back here; look at what your propellers did to the runway!” Nonplussed, the fighter pilot radioed back, “I’m going home. Fix your own runway.”

Sometimes the wonderful people who fly our military planes and those who direct the flow of air traffic around airports see things differently; they have different perceptions of the same problem and of what needs to be done to fix it.

Conventional wisdom is that wars aren’t settled militarily but ended by patient and thoughtful political negotiations. According to this thinking, only by negotiating with enemy countries like Iran and Syria can we bring peace to Iraq and the Middle East.

The facts do not bear this out. While wars—such as World War I—are sometimes settled through negotiation, most are not. Check history. Wars are mostly won by brute force and good strategy. Negotiation usually comes over the terms of surrender.

In Paris in 1968 the communist Hanoi regime of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon, along with the United States, started peace negotiations. The talks were public; there were long pauses in the negotiations that sometimes stretched into months. Little was accomplished.  Ultimately the peace negotiations were carried out in secret. Only then was it possible to effectively hammer out a basic agreement in 1973.

Yes, negotiations can help ease hostilities, but often the pause gained lasts only long enough for one side to find a way of militarily attacking the other. That’s what happened in Vietnam.  The Paris peace talks led to two years of “no-war” on the Vietnamese peninsula followed by North Vietnam launching a full-scale military invasion of South Vietnam. What Hanoi could not get at the peace negotiations, it ultimately took by conventional military force.

Neither in the European nor Japanese theaters was World War II concluded by negotiations. Hitler was defeated by General Dwight Eisenhower’s successful invasion of Europe. Japan was brought to its knees when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes, we can allow ourselves to be talked to death in negotiations, acting out the part of Britain’s pacifist Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who said he and Hitler had agreed to “peace in our time,” while Iran’s warmongers follow Adolph Hitler’s scenario all over again. The result will be the same. In the so-called peace negotiations, Iran will publicly flog and embarrass the United States while its terrorist revolutionary guard forces infiltrate and de facto, annex Iraq. Meanwhile the U.N. and the American versions of Neville Chamberlain will encourage us to keep negotiating, to keep surrendering by a thousand cuts.

The conventional wisdom is that before Iraqi forces become capable of resisting Iran’s subversion, we must train them for many years. Until then Iraq has to rely on the U.S. military to keep the peace, enforce their laws, and provide order and security throughout their country.

During World War II we took our young boys off the farms of the Midwest and from small towns across America, trained them for four to six months, and then put them up against the best SS Divisions Hitler’s NAZI Germany could field. We are still doing that today.  So why do we have to train Iraqi military and security recruits for years while American recruits get less than six months of training? OK, let’s be generous and give the Iraqis nine months of training. Then they should be able to stand up against the best soldiers and terrorists that Iran and Al-Qaeda have to throw against them. Of course this is providing that they and their government really want a free and democratic country.

After the U.S. Revolutionary War ended, the French didn’t stick around for years to help rebuild America and provide us order, stability, and security. The French said, “We helped you win your independence; the rest is up to you.” And they got on their ships and left.

We can only do so much for the Iraqis. At some point, after the job is done, they are going to have to suck it up and maintain their own runways.