Winning's Everything

America is getting used to loss, futility and fiasco -- amid some small successes, we had stalemate in Korea, the loss in Vietnam, the botched Iran hostage rescue mission and the embarrassments in Lebanon, Haiti and Somalia. One wonders if we even expect our leaders to win the fights they start. Certainly we don't punish them when they lose. Years later, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara announced that he'd known in 1966 that we couldn't win in Vietnam, but he kept on sending Americans to their deaths in a doomed cause. For this he was rewarded with the top job at the World Bank, a job held now by Paul Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the war in Iraq.

Why fault them? As all of our war planners are quick to point out, they had the best of intentions, although they forget to mention that good intentions don't win wars. Certainly intellectual acuity has abounded, too. Who is smarter than Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney, all of them with graduate degrees and the sort of quick thinking we began to admire during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who said, "There's nothing like brains. You can't beat brains." As it happens, you can, or we would have won in Vietnam. Strange: This has become an age in which intelligence is seen as a moral virtue, like courage or perseverance -- two elements of winning. Of course, intelligence is just a tool, it has no more moral virtue than Arnold Schwarzenegger's bicep or the ability to ace the SAT, but we honor those who possess it. Could we be confusing intelligence with the skill of winning?

Some possibilities about the people running our wars:

One: Winning isn't the point to them -- they use the military as an instrument of policy, and winning or losing anytime soon is irrelevant. Their consequent fine-tuning of political and diplomatic niceties leads to complaints of micromanagement.

Two: They don't worry about losing because winning to them is a foregone conclusion, as it has been to a lot of Americans since World War II, despite our history during the past half-century. Besides, all the way through school, graduate programs, internships, and corporate and political bureaucracies, they've always been winners. How could they lose?

Three: They know we have to win, but they don't know how to win. Do they know that winning is a skill in itself, a skill that stands apart from tactics, equipment and righteousness?

It gets a little mystical, this talent that foundation analysts can't quantify for a PowerPoint display, but it's real.

Great competitors of all kinds have this skill, the ability to "finish" as they say in boxing. If you recall the first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns, you know that Hearns knew how to hit, but Sugar Ray knew how to win. In 1864 Ulysses S. Grant took on Robert E. Lee with the same army that had been losing to Lee for years, and he finished him -- he was a winner who'd won for years throughout the western

theater, too. In World War II, America produced a stable of winners who won the war for us.

Nowadays is it possible that our leaders don't have that skill? Worse, is it possible that they may not know that they don't have it? I wonder what they've gotten into in the way of passionate sports or fistfights. (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a star wrestler at Princeton, but just about none of them have been in combat.) I would be reassured if I knew they understood what athletes mean when they say, "We couldn't win for losing." And the old expression: "You make your luck." We are not making much luck in Iraq.

This war is not working out the way our leaders thought it would. We could lose. If we lose, we'll be humiliated, we'll be the schoolyard hotshot who picked a fight and then got whipped. I'm tired of our leaders putting me and my country in this position.

I'm not saying I want to fight no wars, or even saying I want to win more wars -- I'm just saying that I want us to win the wars that we fight. And I'm worried that Iraq was never one of them because it was started by people who knew everything except how to win -- who have yet to learn that in war we absolutely have to win.

Henry Allen is an editor and writer for The Post's Style section.