Wow. David Brooks, the New York Times resident buffoon, really outdoes himself today.

There’s a reason George Washington didn’t take a poll at Valley Forge. There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven’t really thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the miserable present to go away.

We’re at one of those moments in the war against the insurgency in Iraq. The polls show rising disenchantment with the war. Sixty percent of Americans say they want to withdraw some or all troops.

Yet I can’t believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and accept defeat. I can’t believe they want to abandon to the Zarqawis and the Baathists those 8.5 million Iraqis who held up purple fingers on Election Day. I can’t believe they are yet ready to accept a terrorist-run state in the heart of the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq, the crushing of democratic hopes in places like Egypt and Iran, and the ruinous consequences for American power and prestige.

So Brooks is now saying that we can’t leave because we haven’t won. Think about that for a minute. The guy actually now believes that victory in Iraq, regardless of the cost to the Iraqi people, must be our ultimate goal. Hmmm, but if “regime change” was why we went there, and the regime has now been well and truly changed, why stay?

Or, if you believe that we went there to ensure that Iraq’s WMD would never threaten the United States of America (world’s most powerful nation), then we can check that desired outcome off the list of things-to-do-before-ending-the-occupation. Regardless of the whether Iraq ever actually had WMD, it is clear they aren’t any threat to us now.

Oh wait, it was “bring Democracy to Iraq”. It could be argued that as ugly as it is over there now they certainly have the rudiments of Democracy and, if our elections of 2000 and 2004 are any indication, even 224 years of “having Democracy” can’t guarantee you’ll actually practice it all of the time. So it could certainly be argued that we accomplished that mission as well as can be expected too.

So, what does that leave? Oh yes, “victory”, which the ever-glib Brooks fails to define. But he does love to use the term. He also loves the term “insurgent” without, apparently, having a clear understanding of the definition of that term either.

I’ll tell you what Brooksie, rather than worrying about what Americans say to a pollster, you ask for the one thing you studiously avoided in your commentary. How about having the Iraqi people decide if they want us to stay or go. That ought to be a good enough determinant of “victory” in Iraq.

We went there, after all, to give the Iraqi people a voice (if you believe that particular reason from the list of reasons available to you) so maybe we ought to listen to them.

If they say stay, then stay. If they say go then we leave, immediately.

I suspect that such a solution never occurred to Brooksie because he knows exactly what the outcome of that vote would be. And he, like his fellow “patriots” on the Right, do not want that vote to happen. It would spoil the “victory” party they are planning…