A war which loses public support as people stop trusting the administration's honesty, ethics, and competency to prosecute the war successfully/quickly or to restore order.
Even after convincing The Majority that Saddam and Ho were evil, fighting with one arm tied behind your back, risking lives needlessly by cutting costs (or having a SecDef with ZERO operations-level experience and who ignored his Joint Chiefs), to enrich your cronies or replace one dictator with "new" despotic religious bigot(s) or the INC who lied to a gullible US president about WMD's, and to willfully ignore the ethics set forth in your own laws and basic humanity whilst accusing the other side of being inhuman, all renders your war-efforts odious as well as ridiculous, in the eyes of The Majority of your own citizens -- who now consider your VietIraq, itself, to be as destructive as Saddam Hussein or Ho Chi Minh. You also don't deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for continuing those wars unless war is peace.
by Frederic Bastiat December 6, 2010