Why do insurgents think we're quitters?

Up until the Vietnam War, domestic opposition to America's wars, at least in the 20th century, was pretty much confined to individual pacifists and political fringe types. In World War I, the socialist leader Eugene vs. Debs managed to get put in prison for criticizing the prosecution of people charged with sedition in violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. But the war itself was broadly popular with the public.

There was considerable public opposition to America getting involved in World War II, but once the Japanese solved that problem for us the war was so widely approved that today it is often called "the good war." And there was little public protest when Harry Truman ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to block the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. When that military operation dragged on until July 1953 and ended indecisively, public criticism did increase, but largely because the American public wanted a clear-cut victory.

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It was only America's military involvement in Vietnam that spurred large-scale public protests here at home. A vocal minority rejected the argument that the communist drive to conquer Vietnam was an integral aspect of the communist drive for world dominion and must be countered as such. When Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon proved unable or unwilling to end the war on satisfactory terms, and American combat deaths neared 50,000, public support for the war eroded. Congress pulled the plug on further aid to South Vietnam, the United States withdrew its forces, and communism swallowed the Vietnamese nation.

Subsequent American military involvements, on a smaller scale, have often followed the Vietnamese pattern. When 241 U.S. servicemen died in the bombardment of a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, President Reagan withdrew our military presence from the country. The first President Bush managed to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, but cautiously refrained from pushing on to Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein. In 1994, U.S. forces assigned to safeguard food deliveries to the people of Somalia suffered significant casualties and were withdrawn by President Clinton.

The peoples of the world have watched the military performance of the United States in the past 40 or so years. What do you think they have concluded? They know that any major military action on our part will be resisted bitterly by domestic political forces bent on crippling the incumbent president. They know – or think they know – that the American people have no stomach for significant combat casualties. They saw a fraction of the population of a small Southeast Asian nation battle us to a draw until we cut and ran. Is it so implausible that the Muslim fanatics now resisting our forces in Iraq think they can make us bleed, slowly but inexorably, until the nerves of the American public give way and our political leaders withdraw our forces yet again?

That is one of the prices we paid for the miserable ending of the Vietnam War. The world knows that America's military power is overwhelming. Brought to bear at a given place and time, it is irresistible. But we have been sized up as quitters – and why?

Because, all too often, we have quit.

That is the drama that is being played out, yet again, in the hot sands of Iraq. It would be a gross libel to suggest that our servicemen and women are incapable of holding on, and winning. But our enemies intend to win on our home front: with the help of the media and opposition politicians, softening up public opinion. Already Al Gore has screamed "betrayal!" and Teddy Kennedy has denounced the Iraq war as "Bush's Vietnam." What is the intention of these men? Where are they seeking to push public opinion?

America already has a reputation as an easily frightened giant. Osama bin Laden and the resistance leaders in Iraq are not fools. They know our strengths, but they have no intention of confronting them. They will play, instead, on our weaknesses. A death or two a day – or, on a good day (for our enemies), half a dozen. That, they calculate, continued long enough, will do the trick.