These defeats left Caucasus to Ottoman conquest.

But these defeats did not inspire the Kremlin to abandon the basic strategy.

Yet defeats do not force new attitudes, policies, or leaders.

Milan fell on June 2, 1800 and Austrian defeats there and in Germany ended the War of the Second Coalition.

No occupier will ever prevail. They wouldn t have done this to us if they weren t afraid. And now they hang two victorious hearts amid defeats.

The Taliban reacted to these defeats by launching terrorist attacks in many urban centers, particularly in Punjab, killing more than 15,000 people over the last six years.

Even before the use of chemical weapons, the Spanish Army commonly resorted to brutal methods of repression, which in some cases included decapitation, after its initial defeats in the Second Rif War of 1909.

Aznar was not the only conservative to replace a socialist government in the Mediterranean world, and the recent defeat of the socialists in Greece is unlikely to be the last.

Colombia s diplomatic relations with both countries were suspended, and Chávez s support of the FARC, which suffered its worst military defeats during Uribe s eight years as President, brought the country to the brink of war with Venezuela.

But the round of peacemaking that America has recently embarked upon not only comes too late in the political life of a lame duck president who has been defeated at home and abroad it is also ill conceived and unconvincing.

Consider Pakistan, for which repeated defeat at the hands of its sworn enemy, India, in conventional wars has been the catalyst for its readiness to eat grass, as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously put it, in order to counter India s conventional superiority and nuclear capabilities.

Yet defeats do not force new attitudes, policies, or leaders. The pragmatic lesson remains unlearned because those who take this view perceive a different lesson.