Asking About Success for the Umpteenth Time

I keep asking and I don’t think I’ve gotten an answer, so I’m going to ask again. Are there any circumstances under which, a year from today, the Surge – heck, the whole Iraq enterprise – would not be considered a success? I mean, short of Saddam crawling out of his grave and forcing men from Missouri to marry other men from Alabama (or worse, Wisconsin), is there anything that can possibly happen that would be a sign that perhaps things aren’t going well?

We’re spending more than a billion a week, we’re arming and paying any number of groups of people who dislike us intensely (enough to shoot at Americans when the opportunity arises), at least 5% of the population has fled the country, a bunch more are internally displaced, who knows how many have died, and this seems to be enough for the cheerleaders to be doing a triumphal dance for the last month or so. So I ask again… are there any circumstances under which we might reasonably conclude, a year from now, that things aren’t going well in Iraq?