Victory criteria

I got an e-mail from Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this morning. It said, in part,

This Sunday is Father's Day, and many fathers in America are away from home.
They are in Iraq, just as many mothers were on Mother's Day, fighting a war of
choice, where we sent our young people into harm's way without leveling with the
American people about the purpose of the war, without intelligence about what
they were going to confront, without the equipment to protect them, and without
a plan of what would happen after the fall of Baghdad. This is not the way to
win a war.

Today, I have offered an amendment to the defense budget that will say to the
President:

"Within 30 days of the enactment of this legislation, Congress expects an
accounting from you as to what the strategy for success is. What are the
security and political measures that you are putting forth that can lead us to
bring our troops home?"

An accounting of a "strategy for success?" At this point I'd be happy with an accounting of the criteria for success! How will we know when we've "won?" It seems to me that when any nation goes to war and asks its young people to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, that they and all its people deserve to know what the objective is. They deserve to be able to make their own accounting of whether the government has met its stated objective and should bring the troops home.

And I ask the same about the so-called War on Terror. When will it be over? How will we know? This time there may be no troops to bring home, but there will certainly have been — there already has been — real damage done to our civil liberties that the government can no longer be justified in continuing, not even by this Administration. Either that, or we will see just how unjustified these sacrifices were all along and what liars we've put in office.

BTW, what if the criterion for success in the so-called War on Terror was simply no major terrorist attacks on the U.S. for four years?