I am getting more and more frustrated listening to Republicans and other war supporters (like the folks making those atrocious pro-war TV commercials) saying we have to stay in Iraq until we “win”. They say that to get out of Iraq is to “lose”. It has made me ask what should be the simplest of questions: What does “winning” mean?
This morning, on Meet The Press, John Kerry asked the same question to John McCain. McCain immediately countered by cutting the word “win” and saying what we needed to do was to “succeed”.
So, now I ask, what does it mean to “succeed”?
According to McCain it means to see established a working democracy that is run by the Iraqi people. Well, doesn’t this mean it is a “political” solution and not a “military” one? Aren’t our troops, who are an occupation force, really keeping the Iraqis from :”succeeding”? If the government they elect by voting democratically doesn’t meet the “benchmarks” we hand them, causing us to add surges of soldiers, doesn’t it mean the political solution is not one being carried out “democratically” by Iraqis?
But Bush says we need an “enduring presence” in order to “win”. Does that mean our “occupation” is what endures? If, at the end of the American Revolution, the British decided we needed an “enduring presence” of redcoats to make our democracy work, would we be America today? (That is probably not fair or accurate, since the British were our “enemy”, our Saddam Hussein, then. What if the French, who came in to aid us had decided to leave an occupying force in our new democracy, however. Would we still be America today… or would we have been shooting Frenchmen at a rate of 20 or 30 a week… like Americans getting knocked off in Iraq?)
If the definition of “winning” is, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives as a meaning since the 14th century: Victory, or something won: as a: a captured territory, then we will win when we own the territory we have invaded (which is probably how the oil guys and the NeoCons see it.)
How do you define “winning?” I think we “win” when Americans stop dying and come home, not in boxes and not without legs or arms, but upright, alert and free of the mess that Bush has put them in.