There is a new round of "Mission Accomplished" cheers:

First came this ‘defeat’:

Al Qaeda is on the verge of a strategic defeat in Iraq,” [CIA Director Michael Hayden] told FOX News. “There are clear elements of clear defeat in Saudi Arabia. … In about 2003 there were a series of terrorist activities, which the Saudi government responded to very vigorously.”

Today the WaPo editors headline:

The Iraqi Upturn – Don’t look now, but the U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war.

In The Guardian a British general declares: British troops put Taliban ‘on the run’

The Taliban have been tactically routed in southern Afghanistan, with enemy forces ‘licking their wounds’ after a series of emphatic defeats, say senior British military commanders.

Must be the season …

Now there is no need to look anymore. We can now all sleep in peace and will not have to care about these ‘finished’ wars anymore.

Maybe I should close down this blog? What can I write about when these wars are over?

But are they? Of course not.

All wars have such phases:

At the end of November [1967], the ["Sucess Offensive"] campaign reached its climax when Johnson summoned Westmoreland and the new U.S. Ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, to Washington, D.C.,
for what was billed as a "high level policy review". Upon their
arrival, the two men bolstered the administration’s claims of success.
From Saigon, pacification chief Robert Komer
asserted that the pacification program in the countryside was
succeeding. Sixty-eight percent of the South Vietnamese population was
under the control of Saigon while only seventeen percent was under the
control of the NLF. General Bruce Palmer, one of Westmoreland’s three Field Force
commanders, claimed that "the Viet Cong has been defeated" and that "He
can’t get food and he can’t recruit. He has been forced to change his
strategy from trying to control the people on the coast to trying to
survive in the mountains."

Wikipedia: Tet offensive