In Response to:

The first is: what does victory Iraq look like and how long do you think it will take to get there? Is victory a strong stable secular democracy? What would the levels of violence need to be at in order to withdraw troops, roughly equivalent to American society, does it need to be lower or would something higher be acceptable? After the security situation was achieved, how many military bases in the country would we need? Could we get by with the four that we have or could we have less?

Based on these answers, what is your best guess on when that victory could be obtained? It is OK if it is a range. Tomorrow? 1 Year? 5 Years? 10 Years? Longer?

codesmithy

<special thanks, for the engaging comment!>
PL

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A little generality to begin:

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be “good,” in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today’s international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort–only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
…
Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism.

But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
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Dr. Shelby Steele

So what’s happening now is that the very enemy that blew us up on 9/11 is facing us in Iraq (just to be clear here – Islamic extremism). We can’t cave in defeat and run out of there and say, “Hey guess what, we won, we got Saddam.” We are going to be setting ourselves up for future disasters. We will never be able to have any other nation trust us as an ally when we have to go in there again. If we pull out of there before we take care of this, we’re just going to have to do it sometime later at greater cost.

The left in this country says that military victory is meaningless in Iraq. Military victory doesn’t mean anything; it’s not solving the political situation. We need political victory, say the Democrats. Well, look what happened to our own left politically in this country. The military success of the surge, and what did it lead to? A political victory for the president in the Democrats’ own Senate and House. Now, if military success can lead to political success in the United States of America, then why can’t it in Iraq?

You’d have to say the success of the surge led to a political victory in this country.

Can we get rid of this term “the resistance”? Could we ban such terms as “guerrillas”, “insurgents” and such? Could we just call these people who they are? They are terrorists! And, of course, they’re gathering in Iraq. This is a battlefield. It’s a good thing they’re gathering in Iraq, and of course they’re trying to recruit people. Could we also stipulate here that war is hard? Could we remind you that two years after World War II ended, the Werewolves were still trying to disrupt our forces and the forces for good in Germany, and these were part of the old SS organized long before the defeat of Germany in World War II. We were in Germany seven or eight years postwar occupying it and getting it ready to go.

How long?

War is never “plottable” on a piece of paper or on a map. It never goes exactly as anybody thinks it’s going to go because nobody can predict the future, for one thing.

As long as it takes. It is very serious. This is the United States of America at war with Islamofascists. Just like your job, you do everything you have to do, whatever it takes to get it done, if you take it seriously.

We stay to get the job done, as long as it takes. I didn’t say forever. Nothing takes forever. That’s not possible. Nobody lives forever, no situation lasts forever, everything ends.

We determine how do we want it to end, in our favor or in our defeat?