ON Tuesday, more than 63 people were killed and 78 injured in a massive car bomb attack in Al-Hurriya neighborhood of Baghdad. This attack was the worst in Iraq since March, when two car bombs killed 68 people in a Shiite district of Baghdad.

This grim incident provides a reminder of the reality of Iraq today. Since the beginning of the “surge” last year, the rates of violence have dropped significantly, yet the growing stability is occasionally punctured by horrific acts of violence. The Iraqi government has gained some capacity to police its own territory, but political progress still lags behind expectations. The Al-Maliki government has made headway against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Mehdi Army, but Iraq is still far from being the stable and democratic country that President Bush promised to create when he launched the invasion five years ago.

Yet this Iraq — semi-stable, still afflicted with high rates of violence, but gradually showing signs of recovery — does not appear in contemporary American political debate over the war. Instead, this Iraq is being swept away by a barrage of spurious claims from the Republican Party about the prospect of imminent “victory”. Sadly, this drumbeat for “victory” in Iraq comes straight from Sen. McCain. He defines victory as being the creation of a “prosperous, and democratic state in Iraq that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists”. But as a goal, this is as lofty as it is vague. What is the acceptable threshhold of violence in Iraq? How are we expecting Iraq to contribute to the defeat of the terrorists? If Iraq is decades away from being truly prosperous and democratic, then how long will US forces remain in the country?

Not only does Sen. McCain not provide answers to these substantive questions, he also regularly shifts his timeline for victory. Some days he suggests that victory is around the corner; on other days he says it will be achieved by 2013. He has also said he wouldn’t mind if America maintained a presence in Iraq for 100 years, provided that Americans deployed there were “not being wounded or injured or killed”. In May, McCain told reporters that timelines were not even important. “It’s not a timetable; it’s victory,” he said, “it’s victory, which I have always predicted. I didn’t know when we were going to win World War II; I just knew we were going to win.” There is no calculation of cost, human or otherwise here, just an unyielding determination to see this war through to some mystical point in the future called victory.

Other Republicans and their surrogates have loyally jumped on the “victory” bandwagon, and attempted to smear the Democrats as the party of defeat.

Of course, there is still hope that US forces can leave behind a stable, self-governing Iraq which has a decent chance of survival. But this is not the “victory” that the Republicans promise; what they have in mind is total victory, the kind where thousands gather in the street for a celebratory parade.

The truth is that any honest assessment of Iraq will not (and probably could not) conform to neat dichotomies of “victory” and “defeat”. There is no doubt that the rates of violence have gone down. It would be churlish to deny that the surge has made daily life more bearable for the Iraqis.

Yet this does not mean (as McCain claims) that the US is on the verge of victory in Iraq. America is not on the cusp of success, yet neither is Iraq spiraling toward the abyss as it was in late 2006. It is simply muddling along, helped by thousands of US troops and a vast array of foreign civilian advisers.

This is neither victory nor defeat, and it is unlikely to turn into either any time in the near future. The Iraq war works in shades of gray, yet the Republican Party wants to reduce the debate over its future into the black-and-white categories of American politics. Framing the debate in terms of “victory” and “defeat” is a way of obscuring the issue and avoiding the hard questions about what comes next.

This is dangerous, for the next president will face a range of uncomfortable and complex questions about Iraq that will require careful consideration and public debate before he takes office. But this tactic also does a disservice to those fighting the war by making the debate at home ever more detached from the grim reality over there. The United States has no hope of achieving a good or humane outcome in Iraq if the domestic political debate remains centered around the distracting chimera of victory.