Military strategists and history buffs alike frequently point to famous surrenders, such as those at Appomattox or on the USS Missouri, as exemplary ways to end wars. Recently, they do so to distinguish contemporary endings from these famous forebears.

The recent National Security Council document "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" makes this explicit: "Unlike past wars, however, victory in Iraq will not come in the form of an enemy's surrender, or be signaled by a single particular event - there will be no Battleship Missouri, no Appomattox."

In fact, the document goes to great lengths to persuade the U.S. public that we should no longer expect victory to be clearly marked by ceremonies in which an enemy accepts defeat. It turns out that victory itself is to have a new meaning.

Victory will be defined in "stages" that involve political, security, and economic tracks. And these stages in turn are viewed in the short term, the medium term, and the long term. Finally, the document declares, "we will not put a date certain on when each stage of success will be reached."

How are we to make sense of this spreading out of "victory"? How shall the public respond to the idea that victory is a process rather than a recognized moment?

Along with the current abandonment of the conventional idea of victory, we find a similar fragmentation of the idea of "the enemy." The enemy is now described as "diffuse and sophisticated." And since victory is no longer a particular state of affairs at a particular moment, the enemy is no longer an identified dedicated opponent (or even a coalition of dedicated opponents). Instead, the National Strategy document lists at least 10 different classes of enemies including: terrorists, rejectionists, Saddamists, insurgents, extremists, criminals, tribes, sects, Shi'a religious extremists, militias, armed groups, and radicals.

Even as the document continues to use the singular "enemy," it paints a picture of a whirling mass of enemies with different origins, tactics and goals. One follow-up article, written by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, actually puts the number of insurgent groups at 100. And indeed it stretches the imagination to anticipate any collective surrender.

In abandoning the idea that an enemy will surrender to us, are we abandoning something more than the trappings of archaic ceremonies? Formal military surrenders announced symbolic transitions: from war to peace, from belligerence to partnership (or something like it). Even if fighting continued and conditions on the ground remained dire, the surrender nevertheless made that fighting and those conditions illegitimate and intolerable.

War requires symbolic transitions. Forgoing these symbolic markers and the recognitions that go with them is politically risky.

The risks include the exhaustion and skepticism of a public told it cannot trust its own eyes - victory and defeat are not going to look familiar, so leave it to us, the war strategists, to tell you when they can be declared. We have redefined victory and only we can recognize it when it occurs. But if the public cannot recognize victory, how can the public trust it?

After initially announcing "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003, the Bush administration has recently gone out of its way to warn us against expecting the types of victories and surrenders that live in our collective memory, those in which the formal gestures of civilization took over from the barbarisms of war. While these recent admonitions have come in the context of the progress of the war in Iraq, one worries that they are also meant to warn us about the "war on terror" more generally. For this administration, the war in Iraq has literally become one with the "war on terror," and for both, the concept of victory has been retained even as it has been deferred and redefined.

But in these wars, the apparent disappearance of clear boundaries of time, territory and enemy should be confronted with more than a redeployment of the rhetoric of victory. The exceptional state that we call war must have an end, lest victory lose its meaning altogether.

Robin Wagner-Pacifici (rwagner1@swarthmore.edu) is a sociology professor at Swarthmore College and the author of "The Art of Surrender." Her work analyzes society's response to violent events, including events identified as terrorist in nature -- the language with which these events are described by the media, the government, and everyday people and what that reveals about their changing conceptions of terrorism. Her book, "Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action" (Cambridge University Press, 2000), examines Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Republic of Texas and other clashes between anti-system groups and authorities. She has examined how society remembers traumatic experiences in its past by erecting memorials to such incidents. Wagner-Pacifici, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and is now professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, is broadly concerned with the relationship between language and violence.

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