Historically victory in foreign wars has always meant hegemony or dominance: You win, you take over.  The allies not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, but also – and without a whit of self doubt – imposed their democratic way of life on them.  The winners took their victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement, and felt commanded to morally transform these defeated societies by the terms of the winners’ democracies.  In this effort the allies brooked no resistance whatsoever and they gained great success.

   But today, in America, as Nancy Pelosi recently put it, “You can define victory any way you want.”  And war, she said, was only “a situation to be resolved.”  If this sort of glibness makes the current war seem a directionless postmodern adventure, it is only because those who call us to war have themselves left the definition of victory wide open.  And now, as if to confirm that this is a “relativistic” war meaning everything and nothing, there are at least three national commissions – the White House, the Pentagon and the Baker committee- tasked to create the meaning that will give us dignified exit.  Of course America is now quite beyond any possibility of dignity in this situation save the one option all these commissions have or will likely dismiss:  complete military victory.

Why don’t Americans know the meaning of this war and their reasons for fighting it?  I think the answer begins in the awkward fact that America is now the world’s uncontested superpower.  If this fate has its advantages, it also brings an unasked-for degree of dominion in the world.  This is essentially a passive dominion that has settled on a rather isolationist nation, yet it makes America into something of a sheriff.  Whether the problem is Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Darfur, America gets the call and of course the criticism that flows from taking any sort of action.  Thus America’s youth are often asked to go to war more out of international responsibility than national necessity.  This is a hard fate for a free and prosperous citizenry to accept – the loss of sons and daughters to a kind of magnanimity.  Today the anti war movement is essentially an argument with this fate, a rejection of superpower responsibility.

And this fear of responsibility is what makes Americans ambivalent toward the idea of victory.  Because victory is hegemonic, it mimics colonialism.  A complete American victory in Iraq would put that nation – at least for time – entirely under American power and sovereignty.  America would in fact, “own” the society as a colony.  In today’s international moral climate this would both undermine the legitimacy of the war effort and make an ongoing demand on America’s blood and treasure. If the U.S. is already a good ways down this road, complete victory would only take America further. And that would also bother former world powers like France and Germany, who would also see America become even more prevalent in the world and they, by comparison, less.

Is it any wonder then that America has failed to win this war?  Since WW II, American leaders – left and right – have worked out of an impossible double bind:  They cannot afford to win the wars they fight.  Thus the postmodern American war in which the world’s greatest power deconstructs its own motives for fighting until losing becomes a better option than winning.  And yet the end of the Cold War has made these wars between the West and the Third World inevitable.  When the world was clearly divided between the free West and the communist east, Third World countries could play the ingénue by offering their alignment to the most generous suitor.  At the center of a market in alignment, they could extract financial support and enjoy a sense of importance.

But after the Cold War, these countries suddenly became cut loose without appeal or leverage in the West.  And it was out of this sense of invisibility, this feeling of having fallen out of history, that certain Middle Eastern countries found a way to play the ingénue once again.  They would not compete with or seduce the West; they would menace it.

Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace.  It empowers those who, but for the menace, would languish in the world’s disregard.  The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinijad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history.  And they follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing.  Worse than evil is invisibility.

So, in the Middle East, America has not gone to war against Islam but against menace as a formula for power – menace as the force that brings the First World in toe to the Third, and that makes bargaining between the two inevitable.  Whether the issue is an obsession with nuclear weapons or terrorism, in London or assaults against Israel, ménage is the power that draws the West backwards into engagement with otherwise forgotten and marginalized parts of the world.  Iran cannot produce a digital camera or a Ferrari but, through menace, it can affect the balance of power in the world.  We in the West, and especially America, then, are at war with menace – the indulgence of evil for strategic advantage – because today it is the power that most compromises us.

And yet Americans are also at war in the Middle East with their own fate as the world’s singular superpower.  Their sacrifice is more in proportion to their responsibility as a superpower than to their survival as a nation.  America fights menace in Iraq and yet they know that complete victory there will only make them into colonialists, and thus expand their level of responsibility even further.  So Americans fight a little against victory even as they fight for it.  At the beginning of this war the U.S. delivered the “shock” but not the “awe,” and then as the insurgency developed, America made a kind of space for it, almost as if they believed it had a right to fight them. Just ask the New York Times.  Victory threatens America with the obligations and moral stigma of empire.

Only reluctant superpowers go to war with a commitment to fight until they can escape. So today the talk is of “drawdowns,” “redeployments,” etc.  But all these options are undermined by the fact that Americans simply have not won the war.  The U.S. has not achieved hegemony in Iraq, so there is no umbrella of American power under which a new nation might find its own democratic personality, or learn to defend itself. They have failed to give “peace in the streets” to the people we are asking to embrace the moderations of democracy.  Without American hegemony, these “drawdowns” and “redeployments” are acts of outrageous moral irresponsibility, because they cede hegemony to the forces of menace – the Sunni insurgency, the Shiite militia, the Islamic extremists, the predatory ambitions of Iran and Syria.  It was America’s weak application of power that made space for these forces to begin with.  To shrink the American footprint further would likely offer the country up as a killing field and embolden Islamic radicals everywhere.

For every reason, from the humanitarian to the geopolitical to the military, Iraq is a war that America must win in the hegemonic, even colonial, sense.  It is a test of America’s  commitment to the good against the alluring notion of menace-as-power that has gripped so much of the Muslim world.  Today America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because it is a powerful bully but because it doesn’t fully accept who it is.  Americans rush to war as a superpower protecting the world from menace, then leave the battle before winning as a show of what, humility? America confuses its enemies, discouraging them one minute and encouraging them the next.

Could it be that America’s real enemies are really paper tigers made formidable by the U.S.’s unceasing ambivalence?  And could it be that the greater good is in both the idea and the reality of American victory?