Militarily,, we won the Vietnam War too, but that didn't keep us from losing.
But to be reckoned a win it has to be generally recognized by everybody to be so.
This whole hysterical media campaign is beginning to reek of desperation, and I think I know why. Despite the insistence on an artificial timetable there really is one of sorts, and we've met every milestone so far. Does anyone now doubt that there will be an election in Iraq next month, and that after it a representative government will be seated? What is left is the last resort of the defeated, an attempt to "frame" the topic in such terms as to make it appear other than everyone knows perfectly well it was - a mission accomplished.
The Dems know this perfectly well. The screaming about Valerie Plame (a woman who is quite alive and well, unlike the CIA operatives the left has outed for the last thirty years) and the insistence on focusing on the war's roots - "Bush lied" - are the hallmarks of a group of people who simply cannot abide the imminence of a free and independent Iraq that they first said was impossible and now say was unwarranted. It isn't their finest moment.
I take gentle issue with your suggestion that for the war to be a victory it has to be recognized as such by people who know perfectly well that the witholding of that recognition is their last pathetic grasping for legitimacy. In fact, it does not. We'll know this one for a victory when the media and the Dems start to bleat about the economy, the Supreme Court, medicare, and...hmm..and Valerie Plame. Come to think of it...