The will to achieve military success.

War is not a humanitarian exercise. It's a clumsy, brutal, heartless endeavor fought with the precision of chasing a mouse in Wal Mart with a flame thrower. Period. The peace of the battlefield may be messy but it is peace for sure:

We helped make this mess. Instead of relentlessly destroying terrorists and insurgents, we tried to wage war gently to please the media. We always let the bad guys off the ropes - and apologized when they showed the press their rope burns. We passed up repeated chances to kill Moqtada al-Sadr and break his Mahdi Army militia. We did what was easiest in the short term, not what was essential for the long term.

Now the only way to avoid an outright civil war is for our troops and the Iraqi army to break the sectarian militias in a head-on fight. The media will howl and we'll see a spike in American casualties. But it's our own fault. We put off going to the dentist until the tooth rotted. Now it's going to hurt.^[1]

To the same effect:

My column on Tuesday posed a series of questions about whether America and Israel have achieved such a high level of civilization that we cannot do what is necessary to win wars against stateless terrorist foes. . . .

* * * *
Is the sole problem we face that we are fighting against an unscrupulous enemy using insufficient means - or is that problem compounded by the fact that we cannot see our way clear to fighting this war decisively to victory in part due to disingenuous, partisan and fundamentally unserious domestic criticisms? ^[1]

Notes
^[1]  "An Inconvenient Truth About Iraq." By Ralph Peters, New York Post (?), 7/28/06 <-- FrontPageMagazine.com.
^[2] "Is It Really War They Hate?" By John Pohoretz, New York Post, 7/28/06.