The problem with triumphallists is that they can't see defeat when it's staring them in the face. Unlike true defeatists--us Mexican mask-wearing bloggers (in case you haven't noticed)--they suffer from denial. I recently read The “We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose” Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon” by Yen Le Espiritu and this paragraph speaks to their situation:

While most scholars have separated Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees into different fields of study, I show how they are necessarily joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued respectively, they together reposition the United States and its (white male) citizens as savior of Vietnam’s "runaways," and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War. I contend that it is this seeming victory—the "we-win-even-when-we-lose" certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam's "collateral damage" as historically "necessary" for the progress of freedom and democracy. Equally important, this ability to conjure triumph from defeat constitutes an organized and strategic forgetting of a war that "went wrong," enabling "patriotic" Americans to push military intervention as key in America’s self-appointed role as liberators. In other words, it is the "we-win-even-when-we-lose" syndrome that has energized and emboldened the perpetuation of U.S. militarism.

The beauty of U.S. imperialism is that no matter how badly we fuck up we can return home with ball in hand as the naive, innocent boy we've always been. That said, Henry Kissinger better get cracking on that peace with honor/victory let's get the hell out of Dodge strategy thingy.