Decades back, I was in Las Vegas for a wedding. Riding up and down the elevators and overhearing conversations aplenty, the structure of the conversations were almost universally alike.
"I was ahead, before...."It is the same with sports fans, who do not get to stop the game when their team is "ahead." The end of the game is always the end of the game.
The headline manages to put a "win" into the same sentence with not winning. This is the thinking today. We "won" in Vietnam until.... We won in Afghanistan until.... For decades now, the rhetoric says "win" until the loss is evident.
This is so with inner city Democrat policies, as with the Biden economic lunacy, as with REITs in San Francisco, as with "drag queen story hour," and keeps to the same structure of language.
It is said, "we" won/win the day.
Until....
Your statement about “We were winning…and then..”
The comparison is accurate for most wars the US has been involved in, especially those run by Democrats, in my lifetime. The question nobody is asking….is what we were going to win? Lots of dead people? More money for the deep state?
We certainly aren’t getting safety, security, and bargaining points in international politics. This is a stupid war with stupid prizes.
Finally, this is why the US loses wars. It’s called resolve. We don’t have the resolve to see them through, or the resolve to make them so terrible that the end quickly. It’s almost like they want to drag them out as long as possible…..for profit.