Sure, we should look to Churchill for inspiration!
There is something very sinister to my mind in this mesopotamian entanglement," Winston Churchill wrote his Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in August 1920. "Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence."
[...]
Writing to Lloyd George, Churchill, frustrated after all the bloodshed in World War I, asked, "Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?" But the British had created the problem, cobbling "Iraq" from three disparate Ottoman provinces. They chose sides, picking the Sunni minority to run the country. The Brits remained there 12 years, bleeding occasionally, until 1932.
Thanks for ping.
We don't need a Churchillian effort. What we need is a Nixonian effort when he went to China or a Reaganian effort containing Russia or an Eisenhowerian effort in going to Korea.
Churchill succeeded because he had the US military to carry the load. Who do we have? This nation is hardly mobilized. Look at the reception that would be received for a draft or using tax cuts for war bonds. War is for volunteers.
"Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?"
Do I hear an echo?