Your leader contrasting American “war lite” and “empire lite” suffers from a surfeit of conceptual props (”Show Me the Way Home,” August 16, 2003). What Americans are experiencing today has been standard fare for millennia: winning a war is far from ensuring peace. This is especially true of difficult terrains. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are famous for such terrains, as is much of Central Asia. A few insurgents—typically called freedom fighters, rebels, guerrillas, or partisans by one side of the conflict and terrorists by the other—can make life unpleasant no matter how powerful the occupying forces. Every soldier will tell you that. In short, you would be best advised to go “theory lite” when considering American plight in Iraq and Afghanistan.