The U.S. Army is not going to be defeated in Iraq, said one U.S. general, and he added pointedly: If we lose this war, we will lose it here in the United States. Correct.

The only war America ever “lost” was lost in the United States.

When Nixon pulled U.S. forces out of Vietnam in early 1973, the Viet Cong had been crushed, the North Vietnamese defeated, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands.

Yet we lost Vietnam in 1975, when Hanoi, rearmed by Moscow, invaded with a dozen divisions, while Saigon, cut off by Congress, was forced to fight what General Giap called “a poor man’s war.”

Books have been written about why we did what we did in 1974 and 1975. The truth is the United States walked away from South Vietnam when our enemy was flat on his back. As Nixon was bedeviled by Watergate, a Democratic Congress to whom power had passed decided South Vietnam was no longer worth saving.

In Iraq, we have fought three years and the cost in war dead is not 5 percent of the 58,000 we lost in Vietnam. Yet America’s will to see this war through seems less than it was in Vietnam in November 1968.

When Nixon told the nation North Vietnam could not defeat the United States—“only Americans can do that”—and he called on the “Great Silent Majority” to stand with him for “peace with honor,” the country did—through three more years of war and 30,000 more dead.

But the America of 2006 would never accept three more years of 10,000 more dead every year for success in Iraq. Long before, the nation would force the administration to pull out. And this raises a relevant question. Are we the people and nation we used to be?

For if one compares the sacrifices of previous wars with the present cost in blood and treasure of Iraq, the disparities are startling.

The war against Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Hirohito’s Japan cost 400,000 U.S. dead in four years. At its height, a third of the GDP was allocated for the war. At its end, 12 million Americans were under arms.

In Korea, we lost 33,000 in three years. During the Eisenhower era, we spent 9 percent of GDP on defense and maintained a draft. Reagan kept defense spending at 6 percent of GDP and broke the Soviet Empire.

Today, we spend 4 percent on defense, 1 percent on Iraq, our casualties are a tiny fraction of what we took in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Yet America wants out and the enemy knows it. What does this tell us?

We are a changed people and nation from who and what we were in 1960. And we live in a changed world.

In the 1960s Americans believed our fate hung on the outcome of the Cold War with Communism, that the Free World was at stake. That belief and that unity were shattered by Vietnam. By the 1970s, part of America, as Carter said, had gotten over our “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Reagan rallied us for one more push, and it was enough. We won the Cold War when our Soviet adversary collapsed of a heart attack in the middle of the ring while we stared, stupefied.

But the enemies of the West in the Third World learned lessons from that era, too, from Algeria, Vietnam, and Afghanistan: If you keep fighting and bleeding them, the old imperial nations of the West will tire and go home. Bin Laden has always believed this.

Seeing the Taliban army collapse and disintegrate in the face of U.S. firepower, George W. Bush was persuaded the Iraqi army would do the same. Cakewalk. And the Iraqi army accommodated us and vanished. The enemy preferred to prepare for the kind of war they have often won, an insurgents’ war in which they bleed and outlast us.

Like the general said, if we lose this war, we will lose it in the United States. Why? Because the issue now—who rules Iraq?—is of greater importance to Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds than to us. Because we do not see Iraq as involving the survival of our country. Because we are unwilling to spend blood for a “democracy” that seems to mean the larger wing of Islam in Iraq gets to rule roughly for a while over the smaller wing that used to do the same to them.

As Sun Tsu wrote, know thy enemy, know thyself, in a thousand battles, a thousand victories. Going into Iraq, our leaders did not know our enemy. They do not really seem to have known America.
Americans are holding on in Iraq today, not because we anticipate the glorious fruits of victory but because we do not want to witness another defeat for the United States.