I understand the reasoning behind a kind of war that is going to take a long time. We fought wars against piracy for decades, and they were eventually defeated. Mostly. (Piracy still exists throughout the world, just not near our waterways). The Cold War was fought for decades, although by any measure, it was a weird kind of war.
But to my kind of thinking, any war that continues *indefinitely* isn't being fought right, or with enough resolve. You can embark on a "War on Poverty" or a "War on Drugs" and commit a lot of resources to it - but if you want to WIN THOSE WARS - you need a Manhattan Project or Project Apollo kind of national commitment to it. You don't toss bones to it, take photo ops and sound bites and tell everyone how committed you are to it while managing something that doesn't show measurable success. If you're in a war on drugs, or poverty, or global terror, and forty years later, all you have to show for it is a slippery slope argument of how bad it MIGHT HAVE BEEN if you hadn't - you're wasting your time.
Personally, I think that Iraq has a considerable amount of success, but it's being reported as a failure because people continue to die. In a conventional war, you can "measure" success by capture of territory, numbers of surrendering troops, destruction of enemy infrastructure and so on. When someone declares "WW2 is a failure! We are STILL losing troops after three years!" you can say "We kicked the damned Nazis out of Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and we're miles from Berlin. Please shut the hell up". It's more difficult to measure the same in Iraq, because we captured the whole country in just six weeks. We just don't have a simple way of demonstrating success, but deaths make *failure* seem more likely. If you show success by complicated data on weapons caches, terror organization disruptions, infrastructure rebuilding, security forces and so on, people's eyes will glaze over.
On the other hand - it's really not our war to fight anymore. We intend to engage in a war against global terror, and at this point, we're trying to stabilize a war-torn nation. It's quickly becoming less and less relevant to our goal. We're fighting global terror, and the insurgents are 'local' terror. We didn't sign up to fight every terrorist on the planet.
But back to my original point - you don't fight a war with the acknowledgment that it will never end. Fighting to achieve a draw is failure. The goal of war is not to kill every enemy combatant, but to break his will to continue fighting. If we aren't committed to achieving that goal, we need to stop.
Personally? I think we need to go in, world image be damned and kick the ever living crap out of anyone who even THINKS about bombing civilians. Because there's gotta be a reason bombs go off every day in Iraq, but don't go off every day in, say, Israel.
