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 How do we know when, and if, we've won?Victory in war is often hard to define
We will stay in Iraq, the president and his aides keep saying, until we have achieved victory. But how will we know when that is? What does victory look like these days? We knew we'd won the American Revolution when the British -- the occupiers, you could call them -- gave up and left. And some Iraqis might think they'd won if their occupiers -- the Americans -- gave up and left. But that is clearly not what President Bush has in mind. We knew the North had won the Civil War when the South gave up and the slaves became free. But that doesn't really seem like what Bush has in mind either. World War I? That seemed like such a dumb war I never was sure what it was about. The popular phrase -- President Woodrow Wilson's, anyway, was that it was a war to make the world safe for democracy. That, of course, didn't happen. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, which included revengeful bits it didn't like; the U.S. Senate wouldn't let the United Nation join the League of Nations, which presumably would have worried about making the world safe and democratic; and before you knew it, Germany was re-arming and getting ready for World War II. That followed the first one by just 20 years. Hard to see what use World War I was. World War II? Now there's a war where there really was a victory. The Allies demanded unconditional surrender and they got it. Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker as the Soviet Army was rolling into Berlin. I remember years later interviewing the late Bill Mauldin, the combat cartoonist whose Willie and Joe GIs fought in the European theater. He said he didn't think WW II had made the world a better place or anything, but then added, "But of course, we had to kill Hitler." And we probably did have to. He was a very bad man who wanted to conquer the world. The Japanese, who'd brought us into the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, surrendered, too. We knew we'd won -- and good things followed. Japan became a democracy. The United States started the Marshall Plan to help post-war Europe rebuild. That worked. The NATO alliance -- the U.S. and Western European countries forming an alliance to contain the Soviet Union -- worked too. The two sides in the Cold War managed not to blow up the planet with nuclear weapons. They huffed and puffed at each other until the Soviet Union collapsed. There were bumps: the Korean War; when the North invaded the South, the U.S.-led allies struck back -- and the Chinese joined in. But in the end, we settled for a tie -- a border near the former original border -- and the nuclear missiles did not go off. Not a victory, maybe, but a tie the two sides could accept. And then Vietnam. Three provinces when the French ruled it before and after World War II. Two -- North and South - -after the settlement the French accepted after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. President Eisenhower refused to help the French in that battle, but the United States got sucked in later on, trying to defend the heavily Catholic South against the Communist North. But it was always one country; a lot of South Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh, who was a Communist, but also his country's George Washington. The U.S. strategy was search-and-destroy, but the Vietnamese suffered through all that destruction because it was their country. Richard Nixon arranged a face-saving truce in 1973; the U.S. troops came home and the North waited until 1975 to capture Saigon and make Vietnam one country again. Now Iraq. If the U.S. simply leaves, that's probably a victory for the insurgents. Some, like John McCain, think the United States should send more troops, should take and hold parts of the country while democracy takes root. But the Iraqis have little practice with democracy and it's unclear how long it might take them to learn it. America's best shot may simply be to hope that this week's election produces some sort of compromise government among Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds -- a government that can deal with the three groups without provoking new fighting and that can last for a good while. How Islamic a republic? What rights for women? Those are questions they'll have to answer. Stability and a ticket out of town may be the best America can hope for. 
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