It's not about winning

This seems to me to be a telling exchange between Bush and an advisor sometime after his re-election:

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the President, 'We're not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.'" The President, he said, "appeared displeased" with that answer.

At the time, Bush saw his re-election and his power draw from the war. As long as we weren't losing in Iraq, he could claim his mandate and try to draw political capital from it. As long as we weren't losing.

I would think a leader, when told the country's not winning a war, would look to revisit strategies on the ground and make new plans for victory. Bush, instead, asked if we were losing, and since has maintained a course which continues to put us somewhere in the middle - not winning, and not necessarily losing, either.