That's not a lesson in history, that's simply a quote by Douglas McCarthur. It all depends on who you are fighting. We fought the Japanese all over Asia and won. And herein lies the problem with "lessons of history," there are so many different situations one cannot legimitately make fair comparisons. Until we invaded Afghanistan in 2001 the historical assumption was that you could not fight and win a war in Afghanistan against the Afghanis. It all depends on how you do it.
It was the conventional wisdom that you couldn't beat the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia until Clinton (to our everlasting shame) gave them a lesson in applied American Air Power.