Hezbollah, Iraq, and victory conditions

Dennis Prager offers the case that Israel did not lose its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in the same way, the US hasn't lost in Iraq.

I have believed that Israel won, or at least that Hezbollah lost, since the end of the war in 2006. I was convinced of this by Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star. In an interview on my radio talk show, he made the compelling case that Hezbollah had lost. .... So why does just about everyone believe that Israel "lost" the war in Lebanon? For two primary reasons: First, the world defines victory of the stronger party -- in this case, Israel -- as either total victory or as a loss. Israel did not destroy Hezbollah, therefore it lost. Second, the world's news media said Israel lost; and the media now determine reality.

Likewise, America is said to have lost the war in Iraq. As with Israel, the stronger party -- America -- has not achieved total victory. Since no one has surrendered and there are still terrorists and insurgents, America is deemed to have lost. And the media -- and its ideological ally, the Democratic Party -- have been announcing the American defeat for years. One lesson to be learned from these two wars is that victory as we have understood it in the past may not be possible when fighting terror organizations. There will be never be an equivalent to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. There is no way to completely stop suicide terror against "soft" targets or to stop car bombs in public places. The only total victory over Islamic terrorists will have to come from within the Muslim world. There will have to be a theological and moral revulsion so great that no Muslim would dare risk hell and universal Islamic opprobrium by targeting innocents for murder. Unfortunately that day seems quite distant. In effect, then, America will have lost in Iraq when America decides it has lost. And then it becomes what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I won't live long enough to see final victory in the war on terror. But I could easily live long enough to see final defeat.