Success Quote by Dennis Ross

Ross is doing what career diplomats often do best: turning a moral and strategic mess into a sentence that sounds like balance, but feels like a trap. The line is built on a double negative mandate - no failure, no decade-long presence - that quietly admits the central contradiction of U.S. interventionism. Success is required; staying long enough to plausibly secure it is politically and socially impossible. The quote works because it treats time itself as a weapon that eventually flips sides.

The specific intent is to stake out a policy lane between two domestically lethal narratives: "cut and run" versus "endless war". Ross is signaling to Washington that the real danger isn’t only a bad outcome in Iraq; it’s the perception that America has slipped into open-ended occupation, draining legitimacy at home and accelerating resentment abroad. His phrasing - "I think" and "going to become" - softens the claim, but the underlying message is blunt: even if the mission is tactically competent, the mere duration can turn it into a strategic defeat.

The subtext is that "failure" isn’t a single battlefield event. It’s an accumulation: insurgency recruiting off foreign presence, Iraqi politics distorted by dependency, U.S. alliances strained, budgets and patience exhausted. Ross is also acknowledging a clock set by U.S. domestic politics. Ten years isn’t an analytic threshold; it’s a cultural one, the point at which a war stops being a response and starts being a background condition - and background conditions breed cynicism.

Context matters: this is the post-2003 Iraq dilemma, when policymakers were forced to define "winning" without the clear endpoints of past wars. Ross is arguing that America can lose by leaving and lose by staying - and that the real task is inventing an exit that doesn’t look like defeat.