That’s the sub-title of an excellent Cato paper on counter-insurgency and us by Jeffrey Record, although I don’t agree with his bottom-line that we should give up trying counter-insurgency campaigns altogether:

Counterinsurgency and imperial policing operations demand forbearance, personnel continuity, foreign language skills, crosscultural understanding, historical knowledge, minimal employment of force, and robust interagency involvement and cooperation. None of those are virtues of American statecraft and warmaking. Americans view war as a suspension of politics; they want to believe that the politics of war will somehow sort themselves out once military victory is achieved. Thus the White House assigned an eager Defense Department complete responsibility for regime change in Iraq. Predictably, the Pentagon immersed itself in planning to accomplish the first (and easier) half of regime change—toppling Saddam Hussein by force—at the expense of thinking about, much less seriously planning for, the far more difficult half: securing the country and establishing the stability requisite for Iraq’s successful political reconstruction.
Why should the United States continue to enter wars that it is not very good at winning (and for which sustaining domestic political support is inherently problematic)? A policy of abstention from small wars of choice would mandate a realistic foreign policy that placed the protection of concrete interests ahead of crusades to promote the overseas expansion of abstract American political values. A foreign policy based on realism would have spared the United States the agonies of Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, places where the United States lacked strategic interests justifying intervention. Realism also would have blocked the expansion of a necessary war against al-Qaeda into a war against an Iraq that, while monstrously governed, posed