Misunderstanding Guerilla War?

In a recent post on his blog on the American Future Foundation's Brainwash, Chris Roach suggests that the reason we lost in Vietnam and that the French lost in Algeria was that public opinion did not understand that we were winning the war and so we lacked the will to follow things through.
I think that this misses a fundamental point about guerilla warfare; the guerilla does not need to win any battles to win the war; he can be defeated time and again, and as long as he can gain new recruits, he will keep showing up.
The question in Iraq is not, can we win all of the battles, it is can we annihilate all of the insurgents without new ones coming in to replace them?
The insurgents' main goal right now is not to win land or battles, but to take down as many of our troops as possible.
Ultimately, casualties matter a lot more to the coalition than to the insurgents, because the insurgents can keep regenerating because people who are unhappy with the occupation have to stay in Iraq because they live there. The coalition, on the other hand, does not live there and so does have the option of leaving; at the very least, individual soldiers have this option to the extent that can leave the military, or individual potential soldiers have this option to the extent that they can decide not to join.
The big problem in keeping up troop strength is that the procedures which get us more troops in teh short run (stop-loss and calling up the National Guard and the Reserves) make it more difficult in the long run, because people will be afraid to joing the military if they are told that they will not be allowed to leave when their time is up. Even paying them more may not do the trick.
In the end, we are going to have to rely on the Iraqi Security Forces, which will, in effect, mean giving hte job of maintaining order off to the Kurds. But in the near future, I expect that the government will start resorting to more coercive measures - not like a draft, but like cutting all non-ROTC financial aid programs for college.
If we try to invade Syria or get into a conflict with Iran, even these measures may not be enough, and we will have to resort to extreme measures; e.g. indiscriminate bombing. Our troops definitely could get total control over Iraq - for a time - if they simply took a lesson from Saddam and retaliated brutally against any hint of opposition. If it comes to this, we could very well lose the moral edge our military has had for the past 25 years, which serves it so well in normal conflicts, and go back to the Vietnam era - not a good thing, in my opinion.