It is not easy to win a presidential election when there is a war going on. I'm talking about Obama, not McCain. The Iraq war that everyone thought would be a cakewalk is now in its fifth year, and it will not end anytime soon. The theme of the GOP campaign is going to be that McCain got it right because violence is down ever since he supported President Bush's troop "surge" less than a year ago, and that we might actually win the war.

Obama is no idiot. He certainly know there are things he cannot say on the campaign trail. Such as . . . there is no value in "winning" a war that should have never started. If the war was fought on a false premise, and the U.S. was the aggressor by invading a country that neither attacked or threatened us, what do we gain by winning?

War is a funny thing. The American people are still wary of starting a war without good reason. Political scientists call it the "Vietnam syndrome," borne out of that endless conflict which turned into a quagmire, killing nearly 60,000 American soldiers and maiming many others. But once any war starts, the American people are on board, at least at the beginning, and Our Team deserves to win any war because our troops deserve victory and, hey, we're Americans who mean well and stand for all that's right and good.

I have no doubt that the United States will "win" the Iraq war if our troops stay there long enough. The U.S. has the firepower and resources to win a war against a small country like Iraq, and winning a war like this is akin to the sixth graders kicking the shit out of the third graders in the schoolyard, even after the third graders grab hold of some baseball bats and other weapons to defend themselves.

What does it mean to "win" a war that should have never started? It is conventional wisdom that the United States lost the Vietnam war. But at least one war critic has suggested otherwise: Noam Chomsky, who rose to prominence in the 1960's as an early war protester, peeking out from his Ivory Tower at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to rally anti-war people in Boston. Chomsky notes that the United States dropped more bombs over Vietnam than all of Europe in World War II. That's a lot of bombing, and a lot of destruction, and death. The U.S. killed over a million people in Vietnam, most of them non-soldiers. Our government destroyed the country and its infrastructure. Vietnam was no longer going to be an economic model in Southeast Asia, and it would no longer be able to develop itself economically without the influence and exploitation of the American government, which deemed it God's will that Americans would control the economic life of any government around the world. The U.S. "lost" the Vietnam war because it could not prop up a plastic government in South Vietnam, and when Saigon fell to the communists that was the end of any U.S. influence in that country. That counts as a loss in the American vernacular.

But under Chomsky's view, we did not lost the Vietnam war. We destroyed that country completely, devastated it. The people of Vietnam did not go along with our handpicked dictator and they paid the price for it. We destroyed them. In a sense, we won the Vietnam war by sending a message to other countries that the U.S. means business when it tries to exert control over another country.

This is what's happening in Iraq right now. Maybe the violence is down in that country, but our military has destroyed Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Their infrastructure is destroyed. All this happened at great cost to the United States. Many U.S. soldiers are dead or maimed. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into the rabbit hole, at no benefit to the American taxpayer or families who are struggling. But through it all, we might actually "win" the war.

Winning is meaningless if you win a fraudulent war. Many investigative journalists over the past few years have exposed the trickery of the Bush administration in selling this war. It was revealed through the Downing Street Memos that the British government, our ally in this war, believed that the Bush administration was fixing the intelligence around the policy. It has been proven through a recent book by Ron Suskind that the Bush administration manufactured a document to "prove" that Saddam Hussein had a connection with al Qaeda, fueling retaliatory anger against Iraq for its (non-existent) role in the 9/11 attacks. It has been proven by many investigative journalists that Bush knew it was highly unlikely that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war started. If winning a war like this has any real value to us, I am not aware of it.

Obama knows that he can forcefully argue to the American people that the Republican Party should be severely punished for its shenanigans in Iraq, and that McCain should pay the price as Bush's partner in this disaster. But he knows that he cannot do this. It is still unique in American politics for someone to win the presidency by pushing an anti-war, anti-imperialist platform. The fire-breathing rightists will question his patriotism, and too many Americans hold to the view that you cannot campaign this way when our boys are in harm's way in Iraq.

The sad truth is that had Bush found a way to end the Iraq war three years ago and claim victory, the war would be a distant memory today, even though the war was a fraud from the start. That is how American politics works. Too many people associate patriotism with support for any war, and they still believe that any war that our government starts should be won. McCain is an old warrior who will capitalize on any positive news from Iraq. How Obama can play this disgraceful war to his advantage under those circumstances is a mystery to me. But the solution means everything for those who see McCain as guardian of the old school, and Obama as the best way for us to start picking up the pieces.