I'd say there are degrees of victory. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was our original goal, and we've done that. Stopping a civil war and rebuilding Iraq on the other hand has more to do with Iraqis than with us (since we haven't made Iraq a US territory). We can help the fledgling government, but ultimately it's up to them.
Anyway, we'll know we've won in the big sense if 20 years from now Iraq is a functioning democracy with individual rights.
We certainly won in the Phillipines in the early 1900s, even though there wasn't a day that you could designate "V-P Day" or anything. Lots of important human enterprises don't have precise endings. Basically, an Iraq as democratic as Turkey, as friendly to the U.S. as South Korea, as hostile to terrorism as Jordan, as civilly united as Belgium or Canada, and as peaceful as Northern Ireland in the 1970s would count as winning.
You know that you have won a war when the other side either gives up, or disappears. If they have done neither, you have not won. Several of the various insurgencies against the occupation and/or against the Iraqi government have done neither. To me it looks a bit like the position in Columbia. The other side has been put on the strategic defensive; but has neither given up nor melted away.
Iraq will be a better place if it stays no worse than Columbia now is. That is progress, but is not victory.
I'd say we'll know victory has been achieved if Iraq can fully ramp up oil extraction and the population, via democratic means, controls how the oil revenues are distributed. To break the oil curse is still a maonumentally difficult task, but unless it is broken, the Persian Gulf and the Islamic world generally will be immersed in conflict, and as long as we re the first or 2nd largest consumer of oil, we'll get pulled into these conflicts as well.
It bugs me whenever someone like James Joyner calls Michael Yon's assessment of the war as "wildly optimistic". I feel like I'm watching a thousand reporters reprint the article of one who reports a red light, and the one other reporter who was there and just got back says "well, it's green now", and everyone wonder what that guy is smoking.
When the war's opponents quit making we-can't-win arguments and have to rely on pathetic exclusionary-rule type arguments. "Doesn't count because the UN resolution wasn't re-confirmed within 6 weeks of the invasion."
I'd say there are degrees of victory. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was our original goal, and we've done that. Stopping a civil war and rebuilding Iraq on the other hand has more to do with Iraqis than with us (since we haven't made Iraq a US territory). We can help the fledgling government, but ultimately it's up to them.
Anyway, we'll know we've won in the big sense if 20 years from now Iraq is a functioning democracy with individual rights.
We certainly won in the Phillipines in the early 1900s, even though there wasn't a day that you could designate "V-P Day" or anything. Lots of important human enterprises don't have precise endings. Basically, an Iraq as democratic as Turkey, as friendly to the U.S. as South Korea, as hostile to terrorism as Jordan, as civilly united as Belgium or Canada, and as peaceful as Northern Ireland in the 1970s would count as winning.
You know that you have won a war when the other side either gives up, or disappears. If they have done neither, you have not won. Several of the various insurgencies against the occupation and/or against the Iraqi government have done neither. To me it looks a bit like the position in Columbia. The other side has been put on the strategic defensive; but has neither given up nor melted away.
Iraq will be a better place if it stays no worse than Columbia now is. That is progress, but is not victory.
I'd say we'll know victory has been achieved if Iraq can fully ramp up oil extraction and the population, via democratic means, controls how the oil revenues are distributed. To break the oil curse is still a maonumentally difficult task, but unless it is broken, the Persian Gulf and the Islamic world generally will be immersed in conflict, and as long as we re the first or 2nd largest consumer of oil, we'll get pulled into these conflicts as well.
It bugs me whenever someone like James Joyner calls Michael Yon's assessment of the war as "wildly optimistic". I feel like I'm watching a thousand reporters reprint the article of one who reports a red light, and the one other reporter who was there and just got back says "well, it's green now", and everyone wonder what that guy is smoking.
When the war's opponents quit making we-can't-win arguments and have to rely on pathetic exclusionary-rule type arguments. "Doesn't count because the UN resolution wasn't re-confirmed within 6 weeks of the invasion."
"Not only are there no happy endings, but there are no endings."
- Neil Gaimen