Defining victory by results not by the calendar

Since Wretchard and Marc Schulman of American Future have already noted Henry Kissinger and George Shultz’s column on Iraq in the Washington Post, I’d like to repeat some of the observations I made in comments on Marc’s blog here. I’ve been arguing for a definition of victory that was based on results rather than on calendar dates for more than a year now. I think that one of the Bush Administration’s great shortcomings has been its failure to articulate the objectives of the invasion of Iraq clearly.

One of the weaknesses of of such a failure is that it leaves an opening for others to articulate them for you and Kissinger and Shultz have done that:

(1) to prevent any group from using the political process to establish the kind of dominance previously enjoyed by the Sunnis;
(2) to prevent any areas from slipping into Taliban conditions as havens and recruitment centers for terrorists;
(3) to keep Shiite government from turning into a theocracy, Iranian or indigenous;
(4) to leave scope for regional autonomy within the Iraqi democratic process.

Will these objectives on their own achieve the conditions necessary for the paradigm shift in the region that the Bush Administration has been calling for? I can see how these objectives might achieve a favorable outcome for the Iraqis. Do they achieve a favorable outcome for Americans?

I’ve been skeptical about the prospects for establishing liberal democracy in the region since before our invasion of Iraq. But, as I pointed out in my post Plan B, Realpolitik of the sort that both Kissinger and Shultz epitomize is one of the things that brought us 9/11 and put us in bad odor in the region to begin with. One of the great difficulties with idealism is that you actually have to be idealistic. Is this the right time for realism? Or is that defining victory down too far?