Reply #3: Depends on the definition of 'victory'...

[Davis_X_Machina]

In this case, 'victory' is control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House for a generation. The courts, too, if you can get them.

Because if you control the government, you control when and where and how the money goes. And with the money goes the power. And the power follows the money.

The Iraq war is not actually a foreign war. The war in Iraq is only incidentally in Iraq.

We are watching in in fact an American Second Civil War, fought by proxy.

Or the world's most expensive campaign commercial, take your pick.

The decision to fight it at all, instead of making Afghanistan work, was motivated by domestic political concerns. It was not forced by events.

The decision when to fight it was motivated by domestic political concerns, else it would have happened, if it happened at all, in the Fall of 2003.

The decision how to fight it was motivated by domestic political concerns, else there'd be a draft.

The Iraq war was ginned up out of whole cloth, in defiance of best military thinking and practice, in order to neuter or destroy for a generation any organized, domestic political resistance to a nascent, domestic, American kleptocracy.

I have a darker view. I fear all the corpses in Iraq -- American, Iraqi, coalition -- have been created, deliberately, specifically, to beat us, here in America, over the head with, as tools of political and social control, playing on base motives of fear, revenge, racism, greed, what have you.

A cowed, angry, American people -- that's their definition of 'victory'.

Clausewitz was only sort-of-right. Der Krieg ist nicht anders als die Forsetzung der Partei-politik mit andern Mitteln.