"We Did Prevail."

Tim Grieve invites us as to have a sneer at this:

[quote begins from Tim Grieve, "We Did Prevail," at Salon]

As Air Force One flew the president and his press corps to Florida this morning, Dana Perino was asked if her boss regrets making "the 'mission accomplished' speech."

Perino: Look, I've never heard him describe it that way, absolutely not. Let me just remind everybody, in case you need it, that speech there, I encourage people to read it. The president never said 'mission accomplished.' I realize that the banner said 'mission accomplished.' That was specific to the mission of that ship. They were supposed to be deployed for six months. They were deployed well beyond that. I think they'd gone to both Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's what that banner was referring to. But I'm not going to --

Reporter: He did say: "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Perino: We did prevail, in terms of toppling the Iraqi army and Saddam Hussein. And several months later, 12 million Iraqis voted for a new government and a constitution. And things looked very promising. And the president did believe that at the end of 2006, he would be announcing basically what was in the Baker-Hamilton report.... And the president believes that helping the Iraqi people now is critical. He disagrees with the idea of a time -- a date to tell the enemy exactly when we're going to leave, because it would leave a vacuum that would only lead to many more deaths of the innocent men, women and children of Iraq, destabilize the region. And that is surely not in the long-term interests of the national security of our country.

[quote ends; link to speech in original]

Tim Grieve quotes this because he thinks it is ridiculous, but it is ridiculous only in the sense in which Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" was ridiculous.  It depends on what you think  Bush meant by "prevail."  In a Clintonesquely narrow definition of "prevail," we totally did.   Saddam is gone.  The question now, as I said earlier,  is what do we owe the Iraqui people (and which ones do we owe it to?)

So make of this what you will.  In enforcing "the will of the American people," Dems and Republicans both need to think how we'll feel if we withdraw and the worst case scenario occurs, and nobody has even explained to us what the chances were or what it would look like.