How painful it must be for General Petraeus, or any operational commander in Iraq, to have to pretend a strategy, doomed to failure, and have it reflect poorly on you, all the while adhering to unspoken objectives. They’re not lying when they say we are winning in Iraq.

They, not we. The US is losing the lives of soldiers, is losing its shirt, and is losing the battle for hearts and minds, the world over. The prosecutors of the war, the industry, the oil interests, they’re winning.

If you’re after oil, or weapons contracts, or a steady buyer of ammunition, then you are winning in Iraq. The land is destabilized and most easily exploited. Bombs and bullets are expended and require fresh orders for more. Mission accomplished every damn day. For as long as our new bases are intended to last. Did McCain admit it could be 100 years?

If you’re after world conquest, there’s a precedent for making this work. Don’t look to colonialism, every last colony eventually reverts to its people. Even China is having difficulty staking its claim to Tibet.

Unless you apply the American Manifest Destiny model, along the lines of world empire building of ages past. You obliterate the enemy peoples, wipe them out, take their land, put the survivors in camps, to die slow certain spiritual deaths. Obliterate culture, purpose, and hope. Repopulate the stolen land with your people, and never look back. Native Americans are but shadows of their former selves, and the white European Americans own all. No dispute.

A more recent role model, still underway, with a high likelihood of success, the way things are going, is Palestine. Israel occupies more and more, drives the original peoples to death, despair or exile, and continuously resettles its own people on the ground gained.

Do we want just the oil of Iraq, stay the course.

Do we want peace? Hire Israeli advisers and kill those Muslims.