Victor Davis Hanson argues at National Review Online that the recent campaign in Libya represents new territory for the United States:

The abrupt abandonment of hostilities after about two weeks has set an American military precedent. True, the United States once lost a big war in Vietnam. It also decided not to finish a war with Islamic terrorists in 1983 after Hezbollah operatives blew up 241 U.S. military personnel in their Beirut barracks. In 1993, a few months after the “Black Hawk Down” mess in Mogadishu, President Clinton quietly withdrew American troops from Somalia.

In the past, the United States has also agreed to conditions short of full victory, as in the 1953 armistice with the North Koreans that has left the Korean peninsula divided to this day. Bill Clinton also ordered missile attacks in retaliation for terrorist attacks on Americans — in both Afghanistan and Sudan — without much follow-up. Yet in no prior military engagement against a nation-state has the United States simply announced that it was arbitrarily and unilaterally going to stop fighting after an initial two weeks of combat operations.