As much as I admire Shelby Steele and agree with him about the nature of the global threat of Islamic radicalism, his column today in the Wall Street Journal about victory in Iraq is about as helpful, practically speaking, as the ISG report- which is to say "not very." Steele writes:

Historically victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. We not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, we also--and without a whit of self doubt--imposed our democratic way of life on them. We took our victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement, and felt commanded to morally transform these defeated societies by the terms of our democracy. In this effort we brooked no resistance whatsoever and we achieved great success.

But today, as Nancy Pelosi recently put it, "You can define victory any way you want." And war, she said, was only "a situation to be resolved." If this sort of glibness makes the current war seem a directionless postmodern adventure, it is only because those who call us to war have themselves left the definition of victory wide open. And now, as if to confirm that this is a "relativistic" war meaning everything and nothing, there are at least three national commissions--the White House, the Pentagon and the Baker committee--tasked to create the meaning that will give us a dignified exit. Of course America is now quite beyond any possibility of dignity in this situation save the one option all these commissions have or will likely dismiss: complete military victory.

As appealing as Steele's talk of victory may sound to those frustrated with the pace of the war (which is just about everyone these days), let's be realistic about what his approach would look like - assuming we could even achieve "hegemony" in Iraq. We'd need hundreds of thousands of more troops, not only to get control of Baghdad but to seal the borders with Syria and Iran. We'd also have to kill Moqtada al-Sadr - an elected member of the new Iraqi government who controls at least three ministries - and imprison or execute most of the 60,000 members of his Mahdi army.

The problem, of course, is that we can't pretend Iraq is Germany or Japan circa 1945, and we can't simply reduce Baghdad to rubble in order to impose our will. The chance to establish the kind of hegemony in Iraq Steele is talking about, if there ever was one, was three and a half years ago.

Does that mean victory in Iraq is out of the question? No. Furthermore, it may be that we need to "surge" US troops in Iraq in the short term to try and reestablish control and, hopefully, give the Iraqi government some room to operate. But success in Iraq is going to have a political element to it, and it will also require Iraqis to manage their own security situation. Perhaps Steele finds that plan a bit of wishful thinking, but it's more realistic than the one he offered today in the Wall Street Journal.