Greyhawk boldly writes that, though the media hasn’t noticed, we’ve won the war (or at least the battle of Iraq), despite the attempts earlier this year by the Congressional Democrats to seize defeat from the jaws of victory:

…few people are paying attention to what those of us who are here fighting this war might have to say. Everyone is focused on the death metrics, and everyone is wrong. Call it “hearts and minds” or people fighting for their lives and futures who do not fear turning to us for help and helping us in return without fear of retribution from an enemy falling fast – these are the numbers that tell the tale. These are the numbers that indicate something worthwhile. These are the numbers that will drive the death metrics further down and keep them there.

He has a lot of links to support his thesis.

And as I’ve noted before, it’s all about the evolutionary pressures favoring cooperation over chaos.

To use combat (or even civilian) casualties as a metric for progress in a war is puerile, but it serves well the purpose of those opposed to this war, and war in general (and particularly wars waged by the BusHitler). Had we done so in the second World War, one would have thought that we were losing all through late 1944 and early 1945 in Europe, and in the summer of ’45 in the Pacific–after all, casualties were soaring as we took territory, and the Japanese were unrelenting in their brutality against the population in the territories they still occupied. Fortunately, the press was smarter then, and knew how to measure progress–by territory increasingly controlled by the victors, island after island, sea after sea.

Similarly, we’ve been seizing territory from Al Qaeda in Iraq, town by town, district by district, to the point at which they’ve been completely routed, and the Iraqis now seem ready to forge a new nation. (And for those of limited patience, it’s always useful to recall that it took our own nation eight years from Cornwallis’ surrender until we had a constitution in place).

This doesn’t, of course, indicate that we can immediately pull the troops out, any more than we could have done so in Europe or Japan after the surrenders there. Now, as then, the war is merely transitioning from the major battle that we just won in Iraq, to the larger upcoming ones on its borders, and until its neighbors (all of them, really, other than Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait) stop fomenting sectarianism and hatred, Iraq will remain at risk of slipping back into the abyss, despite the hard-fought victory of Americans and Iraqis. The question for the administration at this point must be, what next?

Tomorrow is the 89th anniversary of the end of the war that was to end all wars. One can hope that there will, in time, be the last war, but that one wasn’t it, nor was the one against the Axis, or the one against the Soviets. Each of these wars, in fact, contained the seeds and provided fertile ground for the next, just as the end of the Cold War resulted in a resurgence of violent Islam. We are now deep in the middle of another world war–a fourth one, both cold and hot.

Will it be the last one? Let us hope.