Like I said, the numbers I gave are not what I consider hard numbers, so whether this is good news or not depends on the reality of the situation.

Unlike Vietnam, we don't have a client country of a nuclear power against us. I think it's obvious that if the Soviet Union did not exist, the Vietnam war would have been considerably shorter and more decisive. If the Soviet Union still existed, the Iraq war would have been a very different proposition as well. It's a different world, and we need to be careful of analogies.

If we get to the point where Iraq has a stable government, it will no doubt be considered by Arab radicals (either Baathist or Islamist) as a puppet of the U.S., and no doubt sporadic attacks will continue for the indefinite future.

However, if the government is in fact not hostile toward the U.S., or even turns out to be an ally, this would be a success. If Iraq can take over the majority of security needs of the country, perhaps with support from America in the area of things like reconnaissance and air support and not ground troops, then coalition deaths will dwindle to almost nothing even if some attacks continue on free Iraqis. This would also be a success.

I see the end game, in a few years, as consisting of Iraqis handling the guerillas themselves. Under those circumstances, the guerillas won't have any popular support. There may be American troops stationed in a few isolated places like they were in Germany, but ideally for political reasons there should be as few coalition troops on Iraqi soil as possible. Under these conditions, there would probably still be occasional terror attacks.

The actual attacks continuing would not, in itself, be a sign that the regime change was a failure.

If we still have hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq two years from now, while losing one a day to attacks, that would be another story.