despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it

In 1808 Napoleon was at the peak of his power, and then he made the mistake of occupying Spain and putting his own brother in place of an impopular king.

Four years later, Spain became the first European country to kick Napoleon out of their land, and the word guerrilla entered the international vocabulary. Has any foreign occupier in the past 200 years been able to stamp out a guerrilla insurgency? Not even the Nazis with their brutality were able to defeat the resistance/partisan movements anywhere in occupied Europe. The idiot from the WSJ does not know his history either.

A couple years ago I found this pearl:
Common Dreams: Bush: When Even the Good News is Bad (November 26, 2004)

We cannot win in Iraq, Hersh said. "We have no intel. We can't find the insurgents. When they bomb something, we only know about it afterward. We can't figure them out. Someone said, We play chess, they play Go. All we can do is lose. All we can do is bomb."

(my emphasis)

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman