Batfink's Beep -- 12-7-05

Archive: Defining winning down

December 7, 2005

This was due to be next. With the final Iraqi election approaching, and the effort to declare defeat blowing up in the Democrats' faces, the opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is fading fast. Soon soldiers will come marching home, not with their tails between their legs to be spat upon, as the left likes it, but with their heads held high, having established a democracy in the Middle East. And just in time for the 06 elections. The long-standing strategy to claim that Bush didn't "have a plan" has been answered with a 36 page document that is his obviously longstanding plan. Murtha's and Pelosi's ploy to somehow claim credit for the eventual homecoming of the troops didn't pass the laugh test. So it's time to play the next card: There's no such thing as victory, or defeat for that matter.

This is the case made by Anne Applebaum, writing for the Washington Post.

But what if all of this vocabulary -- winning, losing, victory, defeat -- is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost. There are wars that achieve some of their goals, that result only in partial solutions and that leave much business unfinished. [...] There are wars that end ambivalently.

So that's what it's come to -- The Left is now positioning itself to eventually make the case that, ok, so we threw out Saddam, cleared the Sunni Triangle, shepherded a new, freely elected and fully fledged democracy right in the heart of the Middle East, caused Libya to cave and give up WMD, put Baathist Syria (which may have already fallen by the heat of the next campaign season) on the ropes, but really -- what's that? Is it really a victory? Should anyone be cheering and throwing parades?

Applebaum actually uses the 'example' of North Korea to show that, with the passage of 50 years, it doesn't look like the Korean war was an unqualified success. Applebaum:

The South Korean government was independent, but too weak to survive without an American military presence. Red China, as we then called it, was probably strengthened by the war, as was the tyrannical North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung.

An interesting choice of examples, that one, since the corresponding tyrannical dictator in Iraq is clearly not strengthened by his own removal and trial, and the death of his 2 heirs apparent. It doesn't really look as if foreign backers of what is often called the Iraqi 'insurgency', namely Iran and the afore-mentioned Syria, have gained through our efforts, either.

Even as I sit on my couch with my laptop and write this, leftist talking head Leslie Marshall has just been asked on TV if Howard Dean went too far in saying that we won't win the war. The first sentence of her answer was, "It depends on what you think 'win' means, John..."

So there you have it. Look for more liberals to take up this desperate gambit -- just because we achieved all our goals, doesn't mean we won.

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Revised: 05/19/08 08:06:54 -0400 .