When we're talking about a war to oust an enemy government (which is what, I remind you, the purpose of "The Iraq War" was), and in the course of the war in question our military has succesfully invaded the other country, decimated or scattered their military into nonexistence, occupied their capital city, destroyed their ruling regime, captured their former dictator who has since been executed, and engineered the creation and ratification of a new constitutional government, then I consider that the war is over.
The problem is that the Iraqi military wasn't "decimated ... or scattered into non-existence." It was scattered into a decentralized guerilla army. We're not talking about a stand-up war followed by isolated attacks -- we're talking about a concerted effort at asymmetrical warfare that began before the tanks reached Baghdad, before the statue was pulled down, and has continued unabated without pause -- in fact, has accelerated -- since.
What you're trying to do, in the 27th inning, is claim that the game ended in the 9th and we're playing another game now. There was no instrument of surrender, no pause in the fighting, in either Iraq or Afghanistan. This is not your father's kind of war, when we used to go to war with entities we recognized as states, and sometimes even declared it.
The problem with rejecting what I've just stated above (as I am sure you will) is that otherwise you can never really say ANY war is "over". Any the-war-is-over verdict can be instantaneously overturned by someone in the location in question being randomly violent. And that's silly.
Isolated acts of violence do not constitute a continued state of war. Yankees and black folks have been killed somewhere in the South every week, if not every day, since 1865; that does not constitute an ongoing Civil War. Ongoing and escalating violence does.
Some members of the Iraqi military have done this (you don't know what percentage). Some members of the Japanese military hid out on islands after 1945 and waited for further orders. In neither case does this fact mean "we didn't win".
It's also a mistake to equate/ascribe the entirety of the postwar insurgency as coming from the former Iraqi military/establishment. Al Qaeda has something to do with it. Former infiltrators have something to do with it. And militias such as Sadr's have something to do with it.
Like I said: not the same war. It's not even the same enemy for pete's sake. Are you really trying to say that it is?
There was no instrument of surrender, no pause in the fighting, in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
No. Instead, "all" we did was to unseat and destroy the extant governments against whom these wars were fought, and then proceed to occupy the countries in question at will, where we have stayed in large numbers for 4+ years in each case.
In 99% of human history this would have been recognized as victory for us and defeat for them. It's certainly bizarre, by historical standards, that many Americans think we have somehow lost "The Iraq War". Do Iraqi troops occupy Washington DC? Was the American government destroyed and a new one engineered by Iraq? Was George Bush captured and killed? Or were these things the other way around?
Most people plucked from history and looking at the situation objectively would have recognized the result for what it is. For some reason (I blame Hollywood movies, basically), we are unable to.
This is not your father's kind of war, when we used to go to war with entities we recognized as states, and sometimes even declared it.
Indeed. Precisely why it's silly to have the same expectations regarding what victory must look like (parades, smooches, "and they all lived happily ever after", the credits roll, etc.)
Isolated acts of violence do not constitute a continued state of war.
Where can you draw this line, objectively? What's "isolated" and what's not? There is no objective way to say.
Yankees and black folks have been killed somewhere in the South every week, if not every day, since 1865; that does not constitute an ongoing Civil War. Ongoing and escalating violence does.
If ongoing and escalating violence constitutes an ongoing Civil War, then why hasn't the Civil War continued (at the very least, off and on) since 1865? Surely the violence is "ongoing" (it's not? you just got through saying it is, in the previous sentence). And surely there have been periods when it was in escalation (look at any graph, of anything quasi-random, and you will see peaks and valleys. Well, the peaks are escalations.)
Just to be clear, I don't think the Civil War never ended, of course. But I don't see how one can necessarily declare it "over" if one uses the same standards we all now apply to "The Iraq War".