A New Theory of Victory

I just read a book review by Michiko Kakutani (I think that's how her name is spelled) of a book by John Kenneth Galbraith's son who used to be a diplomat in Iraq. The review was lavish with praise, particularly when it points to what it found to be cogent observations about America's failure in Iraq: Nuclear proliferation, destroying a threat where there was none, etc. Interestingly enough, someone in the mid-twentieth century could have made almost the exact same case about World War II. (That it destroyed a nation which was totalitarian but not a threat to American democracy and that also could have served as a breakwater to Soviet expansionism in Europe; that it led to the Atomic Bomb project which, in turn, enabled totalitarian regimes to get ahold of nuclear weapons; that, far from reducing totalitarianism in the world, it merely traded one nation for another and left all of Eastern Europe behind an Iron Curtain) but such arguments deal in unintended consequences (which is, interestingly, the title of Galbraith's books.) I don't know when our notion of war changed; I think that it was probably around Vietnam era, but, for some idiocyncratic reason, we stopped defining victory by how a war was fought and replaced this judgmental framework with our current understanding: that victory is determined based on the ends we achieve.