Like the Vietnamese, the Iraqis will not fight a war that allows U.S. war technology to be effective; and the U.S. is incapable of defeating the Iraqis because its counterinsurgency warfare is ineffective. So the war will drag on. But the Iraqis understand that they do not have to win the war against the United States, merely not lose the war. They have learned to stay clear of the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. military and to survive another day, another month, another year.

[Thanks to Breeze]

OK, this is exactly right, and points out something that we all should be wary of. The US is losing the war in Iraq not because the policy choice of invading Iraq was bad (which, under the circumstances, it was), but because the way it has chosen to wage the war is bad. That is, we're not losing because we're fighting an unjustified and immoral war, we're losing because we're fighting that war (whatever its moral status) poorly.

Some people get this mixed up, I think, and tend to think (or at least speak and write as if it should be taken for granted) that the unjustness of the war is the reason we're not winning it, but that's merely a inverted variation on the "God is on our side" argument, i.e. the one that says we can't lose because God supports us (and God, obviously, wouldn't support an immoral war, so therefore the war must be moral).

The moral and ethical status of a war has nothing whatsoever to do with whether one wins or not, until one reaches the point where necessary resources are denied to the armed forces by a disapproving society -- and even then it's the people's response to the immorality which is the cause, not the immorality itself.

The brutal fact is that if you've got the manpower, and the material, and the right strategy and adequate tactics, you will win your war whether it's a good war or not. Unfotunately for us, we went into this conflict without everything we needed, a fact that became apparent upon the fall of Baghdad, when we didn't have the troops necessary to stop the looting there.

(I suppose you could make an argument that if a country, or that country's leader, is so full of hubris that it launches into an unjust and unjustified war, that would naturally lead to an inadequacy of the resources necessary to win, but while that may be empirically true in this case, I don't see that it's necessarily true in all cases -- and, certainly, the inverse isn't true at all: the planning for war could well have been superior even if the errant decision to make war was taken humbly.)

Postscript: A correspondant objected that, at least in modern times, it's rare for foeign invaders to win. My response:

Perhaps so, but not for reasons of the morality or justness of their action -- it's because it's tremendously difficult, in general, for a conventional force to win against an unconventional one (an insurgency or a guerilla operation) which has the support of the indinginous population. So, once again, it's not rightness or morality which is the determinative factor, it's a question of circumstances, operations, strategy and tactics, and that was my point. The locals don't win because they've got God on their side, or they're more moral, or whatever, they win because they're the locals and that gives them an advantage.

It's also worth pondering that the reason they have an advantage is that in modern times, countries are very, very aware of the international response to their actions. They may publicly disdain it or try to ignore it, but they do continue to care about what people think about what they're doing. This holds them back from fully committing themselves to a scorched earth policy and a regime of absolute repression under which they would have a much better chance of suppressing an uprising or insurgency.

It is, in fact, the very commitment of the modern state to some minimal vestige of moral responsibility which gives an insurgency their strongest weapon in an asymmentrical war. It is this that makes it unnecessary for them to "win" in military terms, in order to, eventually, win in political terms. Countries (mostly) don't go around invading each other for the purpose of taking them over entirely, as once was the case, it's now more a matter of dealing with specific situations and then withdrawing as soon as possible.

More (1/3): In response to another correspondant:

Consider this gedankenexperiment: Make believe, for the moment, that Bush's "evidence" turned out to be true, that there were indeed biological and chemical WMDs and a burgeoning nuclear program in Iraq. Suppose also that it turns out that Saddam was indeed an imminent threat to us, that he planned on attacking us quite soon.

All these facts would mean that the invasion was indeed justified and that the war was arguably just and moral. However, as part of this hypothetical, also assume that everything about the invasion went precisely the way it did in real life: the same manpower levels, the same shock and awe, the same inability to protect the infrastructure of Iraq from looting, the lack of planning for the post-invasion period etc. etc.

If everything happened just the way it did, except that we found WMDs which Saddam intended to use, it's intuitively obvious that we'd still be facing the same kind of insurgency, and the same amount of hatred from the populace. Those things were engendered by the fact of the invasion and by the way it was done, and changing the moral quality of it wouldn't change that response from the Iraqis who are involved in the insurgency. (It would make a difference to the Western world, of course, and we might therefore have more willing help in keeping things under control and getting the security situation stabilized, but it wouldn't change the depth of the feelings of the people who are involved in fighting us.)

So, there's my point again, that the reason we're losing the war isn't because it's a bad war (which it is), it's because it's a bad war waged badly.