What is Victory???

McCain’s campaign is seeking to make a point over the fact that Barack Obama did not use the word “victory” during their debate, which McCain used over and over. The problem is, McCain never told us what victory would look like.

Would victory mean that a million refugees had returned to their homes?
Did he envision victory when the last man who hates America has been shot?
Or when Iraq tears down that ever increasing security wall separating Shia from Sunni which now cuts through almost every neighborhood in Baghdad?
Could we call it victory when a Shia Government aligned with Iran is securely established and maintains military control over the entire nation?
Maybe it would look like victory when the infrastructure destroyed by our invasion is rebuilt, in other words, when we put Iraq back together again.
And what about the more than 4000 young men and women who have had their lives taken from them in this struggle, will their families ever feel a sense of victory? Or those 30,662 wounded whose lives will never be the same again. Maybe we will feel victorious when their families have a big picnic and shout, “We won. We won.”
Would victory mean that the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who have died in this war would have been forgotten and written off as unavoidable “collateral damage?”

McCain seemed proud to declaring his vision for victory. I wish he had given us some idea of just what victory he had in mind.

Thomas Are
tomare1@alltel.net
October 1, 2008