The current debate over whether we should escalate our effort in Iraq centers on whether we have a reasonable expectation of winning the war. But what do terms like “winning” and “victory” mean in the context of Iraq

President Bush is doubtlessly experiencing an affliction of all presidents in the last two years of their term — an acute concern about how their administration will be treated in the history books. Bush does not want to be seen as the president who lost a war in Iraq. He wants victory.

Most of the attentive public predicts that our Iraq engagement will end in a mess. Our public conversation is really about the nature of messo-po-tamia, to use comedian Jon Stewart’s terminology, and who to blame for it.

But what would winning look like This past year in Iraq, about 100 civilians have been killed by assassinations and car bombs each day, nearly 36,000 a year. Would a reduction of deaths to 10 a day and no more than two car bombings a week constitute winning How about a 25 percent increase in electricity and oil production above pre-war levels and a third election in which the Sunnis actively took part We haven’t learned much from the administration about what “victory” means.

One difficulty with defining victory is that we are experiencing mission creep. The goal posts keep moving. We went to war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and to remove Saddam Hussein and the Baathist Party from power. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s original plan was to complete this and turn over the keys to the government in six months. But we have accomplished this mission, and we have brought Saddam to justice, established a provisional government, helped write a constitution and supervised two elections. What more do we need to do to declare victory

An argument can be made that we ought to adopt a new mission of ending the savagery that plagues Iraq. Some say that we are responsible for opening the Pandora’s box of hate in the first place. It’s the Pottery Barn Rule: “If you break it, it’s yours.”

The problem is that there are multiple sources of violence. There is the anti-American insurgency made up mostly of Iraqi nationalists with the support of some foreign mujahideen and al-Qaida elements. The most deadly struggle is the sectarian Shiite-Sunni conflict of death squads and ethnic cleansing. This is increasingly described as a civil war. Finally, within each sectarian group, we have seen turf battles and score settling between individual clans, criminal gangs and militias. Our military’s dilemma is that the more we fight against the Shiite-Sunni partisan violence, the worse the anti-American insurgency becomes.

Our objective has always been to set up an Iraqi army that places the interests of the nation of Iraq ahead of local or sectarian interests. What we have, however, is a class of police forces that are little more than partisan militias dressed up in uniforms. The army is made up of sectarian units that are unenthusiastic about attacking militias made up of their brethren.

The American command has found a way around this quandary in Baghdad. The “Iraqi” troops that will join us are Kurdish. They hate Sunnis and Shiites equally! But this is a poor substitute for a real national army that thinks of themselves first as Iraqis. No one knows how long it will take to develop such an army.

It is clear that the Shiites, who compose 60 percent of the population, will prevail over the 20 percent who are Sunnis. It is not a matter of whether. It is only a matter of when. But Sunni extremists are capable of maintaining a campaign of terrorism for many years. The Irish Republican Army engaged in assassinations and car bombing for 30 years. The Basque separatists have continued such a campaign in Spain since 1959. The Sunnis are infinitely better armed and have unlimited financial support.

What does victory mean If we define “winning” as ending the violence, the next president may look forward to handing the problem of Iraq off to his successor. 

Mickey McGuire, a retired high school social studies teacher, is among a select group of local residents rotating their columns in the Saturday Tracy Press.