Possibly the most confounding feature of the Iraq war, from the very opening of hostilities to the present day, has been the U.S. government’s utter failure to define what victory would be in this war. “Victory” has been a conjure word for the Bush administration, a Churchillian allusion meant to evoke the heroic perseverance shown in the great wars of the past. But no one in the administration has ever said what victory would actually look like. And, lacking this description, even those of us who have supported the war have seen trouble coming for some time. Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.
Historically, victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. We not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, we also—and without a whit of self-doubt—imposed our democratic way of life on them. We took our victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement and felt commanded to morally transform those defeated societies by the terms of our democracy. In this effort we brooked no resistance whatsoever and achieved great success.
