It's almost impossible to imagine a satisfying result in Iraq anymore.

I half-heartedly supported ousting Saddam, and I fully supported staying in Iraq until the infrastructure was rebuilt, but this whole nation-building process looks like a bust. Mainly because Prime Minister al-Maliki is sounding more and more like an adversary than an ally. It's clear that he won't take on Muqtada al-Sadr's army, which is probably one of the main sources of continuing violence in Baghdad. And the U.S. can't take on al-Sadr alone because we have to at least give the appearance of abiding by al-Maliki's wishes, if we're to maintain the illusion that Iraq is a sovereign nation. So we basically have another Lebanon, where there is a powerless, figurehead government held hostage by powerful religious militias with dubious ideologies.

But what does that matter? I personally don't care if Iraq remains a democracy or not. I don't live there, and I don't plan on vacationing there anytime soon. One could actually make the argument that right now, democracy is wrong for Iraq anyway. There's plenty of evidence to indicate that a dictatorship is the more appropriate style of government for uniting groups of people who clearly want to kill each other.

For my own personal interests, the important thing about Iraq is that they are no longer a threat to the United States. There wasn't an imminent threat to the U.S. prior to 2003, but I don't think anyone disputes the fact that under Saddam, Iraq would have continued to seek weapons for destructive purposes. If his crazy sons had taken over for him, it could have been even worse. It's doubtful that he would have been able to touch United States soil, but he may have caused further ruckus in the Middle East. I suspect that confronting him now probably prevented some kind of confrontation in the future.

But back to the present. For me, like most things in the world, the Iraq "problem" can't be broken down into a simple black and white solution. The situation is hazy at best. Victory and defeat are hard to define. The terms "victory" and "defeat" imply that there are contestants, but in this case I can't even perceive who they are or what they're fighting over. Back in 2003 it was easy: Our goal was to remove Saddam from power, and we were fighting the remnants of Saddam's army. We achieved that goal and won the war. That was victory. Mission accomplished.

Now we're faced with the possibility of defeat, even after the clear victory in deposing Saddam. But what is defeat? What is victory for that matter? There are plenty of political definitions filled with vague notions of freedom and stability, but I'm more interested in realistic, non-partisan definitions, which are few and far between.

As a side note, QandO and their readership made a valiant effort to define victory, for which that blog again earned their place in my favorites despite their conservative leanings.

Back in 2003, it was easy to define victory and defeat. But now it's totally different. What's the goal? Who are the combatants? Are we fighting opportunistic terrorists? Are we fighting leftover Saddam loyalists? Are we fighting the new Iraqi government? Are we fighting Iran? Or is it all of the above? How many people are in this contest for the elusive title of "victor?" I don't know anymore.

With the Democrats winning the House and Senate, there is talk of shifting the focus in Iraq from combat operations to training only. While that may reduce American casualties, I don't think it will ultimately have any success in reducing violence in the country. After all, the training efforts to this point have produced little results. American soldiers are still dying just as much as they were before. The Iraqi police and army appear to be corrupted by various outside influences, and until that's corrected, there can't be a stable Iraq. There is no point in training people who aren't interested in fighting for the good of the country -- we would only be training people to fight for whatever faction they felt like supporting.

The Iraqi people also seem content to live under a thumb of oppression, whether it is Saddam Hussein or Muqtada al-Sadr or Al Qaeda In Iraq, just so long as they have electricity and food and relative safety. And really, who could blame them for that? I'm sure they couldn't care less who wins the ideological war between Sharia and Democracy, just so long as people stop blowing up their homes and their children. They've lived for at least 25 years without stability. One would imagine they'd be quite sick of it by now and ready to embrace anyone who could deliver on a promise of keeping the neighborhood safe.

So without the complete commitment of the Iraqi leadership, army, police, and people, and the willingness to endure more hardship for the nebulous goal of "freedom," I fear that the future of The Free Iraq is doomed. That will be a huge foreign policy failure for the United States, despite the successful ousting of Saddam Hussein. I blame that on President Bush. He was quite vocal about "spreading Democracy." If he'd just said we're staying to "rebuild the country," we might have been able to leave whenever we wanted without a nation-building failure on our resume.

Regardless of nation-building success or failure, we will need a strategy to downplay Al Qaeda's propaganda when we leave. They, and their terrorist allies, are the real enemy in the Baghdad fighting, after all. No matter when we leave, or under what circumstances, they will claim a victory, and the media will trumpet those claims of repelling the infidel invaders all over cable news. We saw the same attitude from Hezbollah after Israel blew up half of Lebanon. "Our country is rubble, our children are dead, but some of us are still alive," Hezbollah fighters rejoiced. "We have beaten the enemy!"

Speaking of terrorists, the whole Iraq debacle suggests this unsettling conclusion: Given time and a willing media, terrorism seems to work. That is, we can't control the insurgency in Baghdad basically because, with 24/7 media cameras hovering around every corner, we can't unleash the full might of the American military on the bad guys hiding out in the schools and apartments and hospitals for fear of hurting innocent people. It's probably the future of warfare. It's kind of ironic, in a way. We've spent centuries working to impersonalize combat by dealing death from farther and farther away, with bigger and bigger weapons, but in the end, the terrorists gain victories by returning to a more up-close-and-personal medieval barbarism. I even read somewhere recently that military experts are now looking for smaller and smaller scale weapons for the future. Maybe they will start issuing swords and shields to American soldiers.

Yesterday we started hearing a lot about the "go big, go long, or go home" options. (Leave it to the media to pick up on a 6-word sound bite meme that grossly oversimplifies everything.) A few months ago I probably favored what they're calling the "go big" option. But it looks to me like our military is essentially sitting around waiting to be shot while the Iraqi government tries to get itself together, so it seems pointless to send more troops over there for that. The "go long" option would normally be the best option for stabilizing the country, because clearly it takes a long time to rebuild after the violent overthrow of a dictatorship. That would only make sense, though, if the country in question is willing to work toward stabilizing itself, and the Iraqi government is clearly not in any hurry in that regard. Also, if we stay for a long period of time, our troops will continue to be a magnet for every anti-Western zealot in the entire Eurasian continent. (Also, the modern American public is too impatient for a long campaign.)

So I think at this point I would favor a variation of the "go home" option. I don't think we should pick up and leave all at once, because that would turn into a media circus. But I don't think there's much point in hanging around when it's obvious the Iraqi government is not on board with the game plan. I certainly don't like agreeing with Congressman Jack "Our Marines Are Murderers" Murtha, but I think we should slowly move our troops to a nearby "over the horizon" location like Kuwait, and let Iraq work out their power struggle for themselves. By withdrawing slowly, over the course of, say, a couple of years, we also combine some elements of the "go long" strategy, which would theoretically work to stabilize the country as we're leaving. And by deploying for a time in Kuwait, we remain ready with a nearby reserve force.

Most importantly, we should work to downplay the public knowledge of the reduction of troops. The lead story on the news cannot be the number of troops that have left Iraq every day. That would be an embarrassment for the United States, and a victory for the terrorists.

It's funny how the difference between victory and defeat seems to come down to news coverage.

Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a moderate commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.