Difficult to claim victory without casualties

The WaPo article writes about the Brit bugout from Amarah in southern Iraq:

British troops abandoned a major base in southern Iraq on Thursday and prepared to wage guerrilla warfare along the Iranian border to combat weapons smuggling, a move that anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called the first expulsion of U.S.-led coalition forces from an Iraqi urban center.

"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!" trumpeted a message from Sadr's office that played on car-mounted speakers in Amarah, capital of the southern province of Maysan. "We have to celebrate this occasion!"

Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman, said the last of 1,200 troops left Camp Abu Naji, just outside Amarah, at noon Thursday, after several days of heavy mortar and rocket fire by a local militia, which local residents identified as the Sadr-controlled Mahdi Army.
...
Burbridge acknowledged that constant shelling of the base in Amarah by militia forces, including 17 mortar rounds fired in recent days that wounded three people, were part of the reason the camp closed.

"By no longer presenting a static target, we reduce the ability of the militias to strike us," he said. But he rejected Sadr's claim that the British had been defeated and pushed out of Amarah. "It's very difficult to claim a victory without causing significant casualties."

Because war has nothing to do with territory or oil or democracy or freedom--it's all about the killing.

Burbridge's claim reminds me of a historical marker I once saw on a road leading into Eufaula, Alabama. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, I can quote its text precisely:

This road marks the entrance into Eufaula of Federal troops on April 29, 1865. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia on April 9. General Benjamin H. Grierson was advancing with four thousand cavalry from Mobile and was then about at Louisville. He had not heard of Lee's surrender. Masters Edward Young and Edward Stern, mounted on horses and bearing flags of truce, were at once dispatched out this road, the direct route from Clayton, to meet General Grierson. They met General Grierson at six-mile branch, delivered the message, and returned. Then Dr. C. J. Pope, Mayor, and a committee of City Councilmen rode out to meet the Federal General and cavalry, leading them back into town down Broad Street and across the Chattahoochee to camp at Harrison?s Mill near Georgetown, Georgia.

The town never surrendered. Though Eufaula remained under Federal military restriction about 4 to 5 months, good order prevailed and all private rights were respected.

So, two townspeople came out to the approaching Union cavalry, under a flag of truce, to inform them that they had won the war. The mayor and city council then arrived to escort the Union soldiers into the heart of Eufaula. But, apparently following the same logic that Burbidge used, Eufaula "never surrendered."


"It's just a flesh wound!"