"Victory" and "defeat" are not the most useful concepts

I generally refrain from comments on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this blog. There are so many people competing for attention on the wars, and I recognize that there are huge numbers of them who are much more worth attending to than me. I will depart from that custom here, because of a thought that occurred to me about the wars that may fit the theme of this blog.

Knowledge is conveyed importantly by words, and the words "win" and "victory" are often used in conjunction with wars, as are the words "lose" and "defeat". The war in Iraq seems to have seen an unusual amount of mission creep, moving from preventing the spread of WMDs, to establishing a focal point of democracy on the Persian Gulf, to restoring stability under a government acceptable to the Iraqi people. Thus the very concepts of winning and losing have changed according to what the mission is defined to be at any given time.

National objectives are frequently complex and multifaceted; different stakeholders, even among allies in a war, often have different objectives. The course of a war is often unpredictable, and the objectives at any stage should -- I would think -- depend on the actual situation at that stage. It seems to me that using terms such as "victory" and "defeat" tends to obscure rather than clarify the nature of the decisions to be made. Isn't the question before each government at each moment, "what do we do now, under the current circumstances, to best fulfill our national obligations and best advance our national interests?" Labeling alternatives as "victories" or "defeats" does not seem to advance the determination of responsibilities, risks and potential benefits of alternative courses of action in a multi-factorial decision.