I think I posted something a long time ago...maybe you can find it...along the lines of "what on Earth will you do if we win?"

The short-term answer, at least as far as anti-war Democrats go, seems to be mostly "what is this 'Iraq' of which you speak?"

The conversation has shifted firmly to talk of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and if the subject of Iraq is forced into it, how it might be going okay now, but we should still never have gone there in the first place.

This is growing into an uncomfortable statement as time goes by, since it has always carried the inescapable corollary, "Saddam and his sons should be running Iraq right now." That trade-off almost sounded feasible when Iraq looked like it was going up in smoke a couple of years back. "Better the devil you know" kind of thing, especially if you're a formerly upper-class Baghdad Sunni holed up in Jordan. But how will it look ten years from now? Twenty?

U.S. casualties don't even make the front pages any more. I think there were 8 from hostile action in September, 11 in August. Iraqi civilian deaths (preliminary) were about 260 in September. Keep in mind this number includes not only bomb victims, including the recent Ramadan attacks, but anybody in Iraq found killed by a gun.

I don't know how Iraq will finally end up. I do have a pretty good idea how it would have ended up if America had bailed out at the height of the violence.

I submit that the idea that we should have quit in the middle of the war was one of your side's "grievous errors," championed at the time by your current anti-surge Presidential candidate, and although Obama's been spinning it like hell, I'm not seeing any acknowledgement of that error either.