Hope of victory is what sustains combatants. Attrition can be endured if you believe you will win in the end. That is a major problem we face in winning the Iraq campaign.
One of my hopes for the surge is that the enemy (Although not the jihadis, who must be killed, but the former regime types and nationalists) will lose hope seeing our troops chasing them down and arriving in larger numbers despite the November elections that the enemy may have concluded saved them. If, despite the change in party control in Congress, we keep coming at them, their morale might collapse rather suddenly .
This article argues just this:
On the ground in Iraq, friend and foe alike agree on one thing: The struggle being waged there is a central front in the war between Islamist extremism and Western civilization. The looming end of the occupation is a light at the end of the tunnel for both sides. But the enemy should make no mistake. We are getting tired, but so are they — and we know it. They have done little to prove that they can bring about the collapse of the central government in Iraq. For all their murderous power, they are too few, and too weak, and too limited in geographic reach to win it outright.
It is often said that an insurgency wins if it does not lose. But that is only true when the insurgency is fighting an occupying foreign power that has the option of leaving. Today the principal enemy of al Qaeda in Iraq and their Saddamist allies is the government of Iraq — and that government has no option but to stay, fight, and win. And with every day that passes, that government grows in scope and capacity in all the dimensions of social life — and the insurgency is powerless to stop it. Our enemies in Iraq are likely to discover that when fighting a domestic government that is broadly representative of the people, insurgencies lose if they do not win.
The real purpose of the surge is to not to eliminate terrorism in Iraq, but to prove that the terrorists cannot win. The more clearly they see this, the quicker sheer exhaustion will overwhelm their will to continue fighting. Nobody can fight forever. But none of the forces at war in Iraq is as irrevocably committed to victory as the government of Iraq. And that spells victory for the United States — even if it that victory does not become apparent until long after we are gone.
If the enemy has hope they can win, they will keep fighting. That is the price of our dissent.
We must deny them hope of winning.
