Quotes of the Morning: Winning the War

“Asked during the briefing ‘are we winning’ the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not directly respond.
‘The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency,’ Rumsfeld said.
‘So, therefore, winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the word 'winning' and 'losing' in a war. The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis.’"
-Reuters, April 26, 2005

“That is not what I would call an amazing endorsement of the way things are going there. I am noticing a trend though. It seems that when things start going bad, the answer is to change the definitions. First ‘privatization’ of Social Security became ‘personal accounts’. Currently the ‘nuclear option’ has been transformed into the ‘Constitutional option’. In both of those cases a definition created by the Republicans has been turned around and made into a ‘Democrat’ term when it becomes unpopular and they come up with something new. I guess that ‘winning’ is the next term that will be redefined.”
-Skippy

“`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'”
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“After Rumsfeld finished, Myers interjected, ‘I'm going to say this: I think we are winning, OK? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time.’"
-Reuters, April 26, 2005

“Whew.. I was afraid that ‘winning’ was going to be re-defined too. Apparently we are still using the old definitions in Iraq.”
-Skippy

“Iraq's insurgency remains undiminished in its capabilities in the past year despite U.S.-led efforts to crush the rebels, the top American general said on Tuesday.
‘I think their capacity stays about the same,’ Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of Iraq's insurgents during a Pentagon briefing. ‘And where they are right now is where they were almost a year ago.’"
-Reuters, April 26, 2005

“Myers said rebels are staging 50 or 60 attacks a day in Iraq after the number had dipped to about 40 daily. He said the number of daily attacks is about the same as a year ago.”
-Reuters, April 26, 2005

“Or maybe not.. A year later and attacks are at the same level that they were, despite all of those purple fingers on voting day. This seems to be a version of ‘winning’ that I was previously unaware of. To borrow from yesterday’s quotes..”
-Skippy

“You keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride