I would characterize very few Republicans as being "conservative" any more.
I only drew such parallels because he implied that being liberal meant being anti-military in general.
Now, on to my actual answer: I genuinely don't believe that there will ever be such a thing as "victory" in Iraq. The problem is such that we no longer has a clear, defined enemy and, as previously mentioned, the members of the "insurgency" fluctuate daily. One day they're our friends, the next they're out enemy.
When Bremmer came in and disbanded the military during his de-Baathification, he put hundreds of thousands of people out of work overnight in order to "start over from scratch". That, I believe, was a very fatal mistake and he should have simply cherry-picked key elements to remove and let the rest of the infrastructure of the country do it's thing. I am of the opinion that there would not have been an insurgency if we hadn't fired a couple hundred thousand people overnight who could have literally rectified the country within months, being in the positions that they were.
PURELY hypothetically-speaking, imagine if tomorrow China invaded the continental United States. Regardless of the amount of devastation they were to inflict, do you really think the American people would give up and roll over regardless of how long the conflict went on? Do you think we as a nation would be open and willing to simply rolling over and conforming to a Marxist-socialist system of government? Very doubtful. Hell, I can hear some of you stroking you guns merely reading this post.
There's your answer right there. You can overthrow tangible entities of government overnight, because we've done it. You cannot, however, magically change the mind of an entire populace whose country you just overtook by force and expect that they will suddenly shower you in rose petals. Cute idea, but frankly it is wholly unrealistic and is simply a matter of differeing ideals and values that have been fundamentally the same for a thousand years.