Victor Davis Hanson has a good piece on the American way of war on the National Review website. Essentially, he correctly asserts that no one is willing to take us on in an all-out, total war, as we have the power to win such a war either with overwhelming conventional force or through the use of nuclear weapons. Thus, they resort to asymmetrical warfare. We are limited in our ability to respond to this kind of warfare. We can bomb from afar, or send in the ground troops.

A riskier proposition is to employ American ground troops to change the political situation—that is, to flip a hostile government on the theory the people are desirous of freedom and would welcome liberation. Invasions are easy in a small Panama or Grenada, less so in large countries in the Middle East or Asia with well-entrenched political or religious movements that can pose as nationalists.

And once America enters such a risky landscape, the clock ticks. The question of victory or quagmire is decided by whether we can defeat the insurgents and set up a local government before the enemy can erode U.S. public opinion—either by killing enough Americans on the evening news to make us doubt the cost is worth the gambit, or, by suggesting that the vaunted values of Western bourgeois society have become sullied in the conflict at places like My Lai or Abu Ghraib. The key in any such effort is mostly political: Can indigenous forces, with American aid and the promise of democratic government, take the lead in the fight, ensuring fewer American losses, while offering something better than the past that resonates with sympathetic Westerners?

Read the whole thing. Hanson believes the jury is still out. I think the verdict is in, and it fits neatly within the American historical experience. Americans do not have the stomach or the patience for long, limited wars. Americans are a black-and-white people. They want WAR or they want PEACE, not anything in-between. Thus, the support for these limited wars erodes as it becomes clear that our troops are handcuffed by rules that limit their ability to make all-out WAR. While I still hope for the best, I fear that we will not have a happy outcome in Iraq, and maybe not even in Afghanistan.

It has now reached the point that some are calling it "Iraq Syndrome" (in the tradition of the "Vietnam Syndrome".

According to this column, American soldiers are generating road rage in Kabul.

Not only are American soldiers inconsiderate in Afghanistan, according to the new Iraqi Prime Minister, they are downright dangerous to civilians in Iraq.

How many more Americans have now decided that the Iraqis and Afghans can 'go to hell', after hearing the story about the anti-American riots in Kabul and the condemnation from the Iraqi PM who is only sitting in his chair because our troops liberated his country? This is the drip-drip-drip that is eroding public support for these wars and may lead to a return to isolationism.