Eliminating the enemy's ability to make war on us on our allies is the main goal of any war.

How this is accomplished varies widely. Sometimes you can utterly defeat a formal state enemy, as with Japan and Germany in WWII. Nobody remembers now what hellholes they were for years after the war, but when we gave Japan back after seven years of occupation, the country prospered.

Sometimes you have a standoff, as in Korea or Europe, where thousands of U.S. troops stayed in place for decades to maintain the peace. Nobody really cared because nobody was shooting at them. There were once twice as many troops in peacetime Europe as there were in Iraq at the peak of the war.

Losing? It isn't hard to define losing. It's giving up in the middle of the fight and letting the enemy do whatever they want with the country. This is what happened in Vietnam. We have tourists there now, but you don't hear about the camps and killings. I live in a part of California with a lot of Vietnamese people. You hear things.

"I'm sorry, but it doesn't look like we're winning. Let's go home." You don't hear that very often in the list of famous quotes from military leaders. As I told Bowser, the idea of "exit strategy" is a recent political invention.

A stable government in Iraq that stomps on Islamic terrorists just as eagerly as any Western nation would is a success. Did anybody notice the losses by the radical religious parties in the last election? An added bonus is that unlike Saddam's former government, it's a lot less likely to invade Iran or Kuwait, toss Scuds at Israel, develop WMD, or kill off large portions of its own population.

The same is true in Afghanistan. If you read Blair's report I linked to below, the situation is more complex than either Bowser or the article he links to implies. There's a reason al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are holed up in Western Pakistan instead of Afghanistan.