Leviticus 26:19 gives a prophecy of time when Israel would lose the "pride of its power" due to sin and disobedience of God's laws. This scripture also applies to America and Britain, the modern inheritors of the promises of the God promises to Abraham. We have applied this verse to American actions over the past sixty years in wars that have failed to bring about decisive victory on the order of the victory in World War II. Since then America has not won any major war with the same decisive mandate achieved over the Axis Powers. Korea and Vietnam are classic examples. And this is in spite of America being the single greatest military power during this period.

For three years in Iraq America has been struggling against an insurgency that has not hope of victory against American power. Yet troops and weapons have not been effectively deployed to defeat a far inferior enemy. We are seeing the same  anguish arguing for withdrawal without victory.

Historian Shelby Steel explains this from the perspective of white guilt over past "imperialist sins" in this WSJ piece today. Here are a couple of excerpts:
 

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

Steele also says this white guilt is at the heart of American inability to deal with its immigration problem with Mexico. This is the best article I  have seen in recent years to understand how we have lost a "pride of power".  Read it here.