War and "Will"

Since we're already at a point in the Iraq War where the hawks are reduced to arguing, "We're at war so we have to stay at war and if you don't want to you're a wuss," it worth thinking about what that vague quantity of Will means in terms of the support of the public for a war.

Jeffrey Record in Hollow Victory (1993) summed up the American experience well, at least as well as one can summarize such a complicated issue briefly.  The US officer corps as well as many political leaders concluded from the Vietnam experience that public willingness to support protracted wars was a key problem, if not the country's greatest military weakness.

Actually, it may the be most important thing about democracy that ordinary people mostly don't have the faith in the purging and regenerative power of war and killing that the "neoconservatives" and more old-fashioned militarists do.  Here's what Record had to say (my emphasis):

It is instructive to note that U.S. military personnel killed in the Vietnam War (58,000) only slightly surpassed those of the Korean War (54,000), and were dwarfed by those of World War II (407,000). This suggests that casualties per se are not a reliable predictor of American tolerance for wars, protracted or not. What distinguished Vietnam from World War II, and to a lesser extent the Korean conflict, was that in Vietnam casualties were being sustained with no apparent progress toward victory, or, to put perhaps a finer point on it, in the absence of an understandable or acceptable definition of victory. Moreover, World War II and Korea, like the Gulf War, were initiated by unambiguous acts of conventional aggression across internationally observed boundaries.

Americans are, in fact, willing to sacrifice much blood and treasure on behalf of what they regard, rightly or wrongly, as legitimate causes, and as long as there remains a connection between that sacrifice and visible advancement toward an end of hostilities on desirable terms - i.e., "light at the end of the tunnel." The American people will support even a costly war for a just cause, but they will withdraw their support when they no longer see a reasonable chance for realizing a preferred or acceptable outcome. The connection between sacrifice and progress was seemingly severed in Indochina by the Tet Offensive, which to many Americans viewing it through the prism of their own media appeared to portend an endless and indecisive war. American impatience, and for the same reasons, was no less apparent in the Reagan administration's intervention in Lebanon in 1982-84. What prompted public and congressional outcry, and that intervention's ultimate termination, over the deaths of 241 Americans in the October 23, 1983, truck-bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut was not just the loss of life, but that the dead seemed to have died in vain. The Reagan administration never offered a coherent or convincing statement of U.S. interests in Lebanon, or a picture of how its casual intervention in that anarchic country might foster those interests, whatever they were.  By October 1983 it appeared to many Americans that the Marines in Beirut were serving no function other than providing targets for Hezbollah snipers.

And that means it does matter whether the reason for starting the war was based on manufactured evidence or not.  It means that a war has to have some goal other than show toughness, resolve, Will, testosterone adequacy, or similar things.  Did most people know that we were going to war in Iraq to install a pro-Iranian Shia government that will base its legislation on their interpretation of sharia (Islamic law)?

Yes, "9/11 changed everything."  Well, not quite everything.  Wars have to have some reasonable and achievable goal for them to make any sense.