Who won the bloody war?

Did we win the Iraq war? By 19th century standards, sure - we kicked a lot of people's asses and imposed our political will on another country. Ilan Goldenberg disagrees:

It's an interesting definition of "victory." I guess you can define victory as more than 4,000 American fatalities, more than 30,000 wounded, probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, millions of Iraqis displaced, $1-$3 trillion in costs to the U.S. economy, an empowered Iran, an unaddressed threat in Afghanistan, and massive damage to America's image around the world. All for a war that did not actually achieve its original objectives - eliminate a WMD threat that wasn't there, eliminate a terrorism threat that wasn't there, and spread democracy throughout the Middle East. I guess we can define "victory" that way. Probably wouldn't be my definition though.

So does Ezra Klein:

Fragile stability is better than murderous chaos. But it is not victory. And since future policy decisions are made on the basis of past policy conclusions, it's important to be clear. This war has been a failure. There were no WMDs. We have not spread democracy. We have not scared the terrorists. We have not emerged looking stronger. Our eventual effort to stave off total collapse and civil war in Iraq may have been a partial success, but that is not the same thing as victory.

Of course, this begs the question: Who really wins any war? Everyone agrees that Russia won World War 2 and Germany lost...but the net result of the war was that Germany became a wealthy, secure, happy place and Russia became even more of a terrified, poor, oppressed, unhappy place. Russia also lost a lot more people than Germany. Same thing with China and Japan - in losing, Japan became a richer place than it had ever been as an empire, while China went on to see 50 million people perish in a famine, 2 million in a civil war, and more millions in decades of misrule. So victory isn't such a clear-cut thing. The idea of "winning" and "losing" wars was invented back when empires would fight over territory; one side's loss was usually another side's gain. But that's just not the case anymore. In Iraq, we came, we saw, we tore the place up. They killed a few of our guys, we killed a ton of their guys. Will the long-run effects be a net positive or a net negative for the world? That's anybody's guess. But when deciding whether to go to war in the future, maybe we should think less about "Will we win?" and more about "What will we get?"...