How does a dictator define victory? In 1991, Saddam Hussein convinced himself that he had beaten America in the First Gulf War. Saddam’s army had been routed and his air force and navy pretty much destroyed. During a ground campaign lasting only 100 hours (in which, incidentally, not a single US or British soldier was killed by enemy fire in battle), Iraq was ignominiously expelled from Kuwait.
So why did Saddam think he had won? Well, at the moment of the ceasefire, he was still alive in Baghdad and able to call himself “president of Iraq”. Never mind that his foreign adventure had resulted in one of the most comprehensive military defeats of all time.
The lesson is that when it comes to claiming victory, dictators set the bar very low. We may now be seeing a version of this phenomenon in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has lost control of swathes of his country, including the northern and southern border regions and the largely Kurdish area of the north-east. Syria's biggest city, Aleppo, is now contested territory.
True, Assad has won a series of battles in recent months, but the aim of this offensive is not to reimpose his rule over all of Syria. Instead, his relatively modest objective is to dominate a corridor of territory linking Damascus with the Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast around Latakia.
Put simply, Assad has written off most of Syria. He is strengthening his grip on an area of the country. But he is not, in any real sense, the president of all Syria. His writ no longer runs over most of the country – and he is not trying to change that in anything but a limited sense. In reality, he is fighting to secure his position as the most powerful warlord in a country of warlords.
In his own mind, however, Assad might believe he is winning because he still holds Damascus and his traditional heartland. I wonder if he will succumb to the Saddam definition of victory: as long as you are alive and in your capital – and your entourage of sycophants still calls you “Mr President” – then you have won.
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