What do we win?

During the last days before we invaded Iraq, I had several conversations with different people who stated that they had opposed the war, but that since we had committed to the action, "we can't afford to lose." My question at the time was: what would we lose? A long pause invariably followed. Thanks to the jackhammer-like repetition of that phrase in the media (and lord knows we were all watching a lot of it at the time), it felt like a question with obvious answers, yet they weren't obvious enough, at least, to be cited easily or in a straightforward fashion. Most of the answers tended to be variations on one of three themes:

1. Threatening to use force then backing down would be a sign of weakness, emboldening other bad actors and reducing our ability to project force elsewhere.
2. We had spent thirty billion dollars enforcing the no-fly zones over the previous dozen years, and we simply couldn't do that forever.
3. Well, there's no doubt he has the weapons, so this is our one chance to eliminate them.

The last one really doesn't need commentary at this point. The first one makes a certain intuitive sense, but by invading and finding ourselves badly undermanned, poorly received, and unable to provide anything resembling security, we've achieved exactly the same state, but on an entirely larger scale. We're more or less tapped out militarily and if anything, we've managed to forge better ties among formerly competing bad actors by presenting a nice, easily identifiable common enemy. In fact, we've established Jihad University.

As to the second, we'll soon have spent ten times that amount in less than three years and we're nowhere near the end of the bill. This Rumsfeld quote led most news outlets today:

The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win.

I'm filing this one under E for "even a stopped clock," since the first three sentences are absolutely true. Oooh, but he should have stopped while he was ahead. It's nice that Ibrahim al-Jaafari says that two years will be more than enough time to achieve this, but I doubt he believes it. We've been there a little over two years and still haven't managed to secure the seven-mile road from the Green Zone to the airport.

So, the things we'd have lost by not invading, we have lost quite more severely by invading. A few other things have been lost, too: nearly 2000 Coalition soldiers, hundreds of contractors, thousands of Iraqi army conscripts, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, our moral compass*, our sense of community, and much of the world's goodwill.

Yet, for all that, we remain stuck hip-and-shoulder-deep in this Mesopotamian tarbaby, with the usual suspects screeching treason at all the liberal underminers who don't stand and cheer at how hard we punched that gooey bastard. I still think pulling out is the least bad of our options, but make no mistake: it's bad, and I don't share Professor Cole's optimism about the feasibility of an international force. However, if one organizing principle exists within the Bush administration, it is never admit you're wrong. Accordingly, I expect us to muddle along toward no discernible goal for the duration. Unless, of course, they really are insane, and that has yet to be disproven.

Flogging this horse may be bad form, but more than a few of us pointed out that entering Iraq would result in being stuck in a situation we couldn't control with no good options, an utterly sensible and obvious position that was derided as a bunch of commie hippie loserism by "responsible" Republicans and Democrats alike. I'm used to hearing that, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but seeing retrospectively how the commie hippie loser brigade has happened to be right, oh, about 90% of the time in regards to expeditionary wars, you'd think the triumphalists would at least dial the volume back a bit and hedge their bets. You'd be wrong, of course, but you'd think it because you want to believe in the basic intelligence of your fellow citizens as badly as the War Party wants to believe in the omnipotence of American military might. Turns out we're both blinkered optimists in our own special, self-deluded ways.

So, if you still think we need to stay, sans timetable, until we "win," the question now is what do we win? Or rather, what milestone that remains in the province of the feasible would constitute a win?

*Man, can anybody look straight at you and lie - when he knows you know he's lying - like Alberto Gonzalez? "[T]he United States would never send terrorism suspects to countries where they would be tortured." Ladies and gentlemen, meet your next Supreme Court justice. He's gonna fit right in.