Wretchard Strikes Again

If you were to ask most serious bloggers, at least the moderates and conservatives, who their own personal favorite bloggers are, I bet you would find Wretchard of the Belmont Club pretty high up the list. He's famous (well, at famous among bloggers) for his thoughtful, lengthy posts that seldom fail to show real insight into pressing problems.

His latest is of a similar quality (hat tip to RealClearPolitics). He asks the question, what is victory against an insurgency? Do the insurgents win if they merely stay alive? Wretchard puts forth his own definition:

Seizing state power over a definite territory is the explicit objective of nearly every guerilla armed force in the world today: if they can achieve that, they win. If they cannot achieve that and have no realistic prospect of ever achieving that, they are defeated, however long they may continue to exist.

Then Wretchard summarizes the current state of the insurgency:

...No national united front; no united hard core of leadership; no victorious armed force. This in addition to no territory and increasingly, no money and what is there left? Well there is the ability to kill civilians and to avoid being totally exterminated by the Coalition; but that is not insurgent victory nor even the prospect of victory.

In the face of increasing gloom and doom among the press and the public, we cannot stress this often enough or forcefully enough: Not only are we not losing, we have, in many ways, already won.