'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.'
And likewise when stooges for Big Oil invent and endlessly continue a senseless war, there's really no way to define winning or losing except in their own twisted language.
Torture is NOT torture, they say, children burned alive by drones were NOT children, and in general every word means what they want it to mean, neither more nor less!
So when stooge-Washington celebrates every drone-strike for killing yet another senior leader of al Qaeda, and there really isn't much else to celebrate, I think it's fair to say that winning the War on Terror means killing or otherwise neutralizing all or almost all of the senior leadership of al Qaeda.
It's a very slow process. For example, McClatchy News calculates that in a whole year from September 2010 to September 2011, drone strikes killed 482 people in Pakistan, but only 6 senior al Qaeda leaders.
This is like one of those low-scoring football games that the Southeastern Conference used to be famous for.
"It's late in the 4th quarter, fans, and Alabama leads Mississippi 6-0!"
Then Mississippi scores 500 points.
Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them, authorities said on Monday, Jul 22, 2013 .
"The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of al Qaeda and had received death sentences," Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.
This game is over!
The referees throw away their whistles! The Alabama coach rips off his toupee and stomps it into smithereens! Alabama fans boo lustily as they exit the stadium!
And meanwhile...
Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off in Hell.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
And that's exactly what happened.