From the "I don't know a bloody thing about history" file:

This resembled the end of the Cold War because it was, in a different context, exactly the same thing.It's the end of a vicious, oppressive dictatorship, that had clung on to power, with the help of the Soviet Union and France and China, well past its due date.

Hmm...Let's see. Was Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold war:

-Vicious? Nope.
-Oppressive? Not really- witness his bringing back that critical physicist from Siberia, and the reason the August 1991 coup happened was partially because he was so eager not to oppress.
-A Dictator? He was responsible for building an elected assembly and was a committed democratic reformer. If anything his successor was the dictatorial one, as his flood of presidential decrees can attest, along with his willingness to wreck the region in order to gain power. (The CIS was a sad joke.)
-Beaten by American troops? Nope, only by the unworkability of his own economic system, which was understood way back in the Brezhnev and Krushchev days, but they were too paranoid about the United States to do anything about it. Reagan, if anything, pushed the reforms back.
-in any way comparable to Saddam Hussein? Not by a longshot. Hell, neither was Brezhnev or Krushchev. Gorbachev was about as Stalinist as Sullivan himself. Less so, probably.

So what on earth is Sullivan on about? Oh yeah- obfuscating the point that the Soviet Union ended peacefully, and that American force usually ends up doing more harm than good. Will it in this case? Only if Americans let Bush get away with it. It already happened once in Afghanistan. Let's not let it happen again, hmm?