Winning or Losing in Iraq?

King posted a great quote by Peter Schoomaker yesterday. The army chief of staff must take lessons from the same speaking coach as Bush, to offer such a muddled response; at the same time, he was faced with a difficult question. Are we winning in Iraq?

As I've argued before, winning or losing depends on the objective. If the objective is overthrowing Saddam Hussein, we won years ago, "Mission Accomplished." If the mission is to build a stable, democratic Iraq, we never should have put our uniforms on and left the balls on the bus: we've been losing that war since the invasion. Bush Senior (and Powell) decided not to sack Baghdad in Gulf War 1 for this very reason.