WASHINGTON

NOBODY will quibble with President Bush’s line Wednesday night that in Iraq, “Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved; there will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.”

Of course, that calls to mind his victory landing on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California in May 2003, which he followed with a speech declaring that, “in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

But let’s not digress. Mr. Bush has now scaled back his strategy for victory to a strategy for the best-we-can-hope-for. So, it must be asked, what exactly is the best we can hope for?

“In the best-case scenario, we’ll be in Iraq for 15 or 20 years,” said Stephen Biddle, author of “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.” He offers the example of the Balkans, where everyone seems to have forgotten about the United States troops who have been there for years, helping keep a peace brokered in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.