Bing West has been one of the most astute observers of the war in Iraq. Having just returned from his 15th visit, he says we have won Iraq through:

Decency, Toughness … and No Shortcuts
By Bing West
The Atlantic
September 24, 2008

The Iraq war has faded as an item of interest to the national press because the violence has plummeted, while a consensus has formed that the American military learned from experience and now knows what it’s doing. In 2006, we were losing the war; today, the military trajectory is encouraging, and U.S. forces are slowly withdrawing. During my 15th trip to Iraq in August, for the first time I didn’t hear a shot fired. In several cities, I walked into markets with only a few American soldiers, and was immediately surrounded by Iraqis eager to talk about the economy, security, politics, whatever.

Normality? Nowhere close. Concrete barriers (designed to restrict the flesh-ripping radius of suicide bombers) were still in place, enclosing neighborhoods in Baghdad and a dozen other cities. Car bombings and criminal kidnappings persisted, as did battles against disparate al-Qaeda cells and Shiite insurgent gangs incited by Iran. Still, Iraq was not engulfed in civil war. The Sunni resistance had largely collapsed.

A sure sign that the war in Iraq has turned around has been the rush to take credit. Victory has a thousand fathers. This would seem a harmless parlor game, were Afghanistan not looming. Military success in Iraq is sure to lead to lessons to be applied in Afghanistan. Let’s make sure we pick the right lessons.

What did cause the turnaround since 2006? Three competing explanations have popped up. Some have claimed that covert operations, involving the use of top-secret technical devices, are what drove the insurgency’s leaders from Iraq. Others attribute the turnaround to Bush’s decision in January 2007 to add 30,000 more troops. And still others suggest that it is the brilliance of General Petraeus, who took command in Iraq in February of 2007, that we have to thank for the improvements.

There is some truth to each of the three explanations. But all fall wide of the mark. The foremost reason for the turnaround is that the Sunni population switched from attacking American (and Iraqi Army) soldiers to aligning with them against al-Qaeda. What prompted that switch was the behavior of the American soldiers contrasted with that of the al-Qaeda fighters.

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Now that the Dems can no longer deny the success of the surge, let’s see if they can deny the fact that reconciliation is occurring in Iraq.

Meanwhile In Iraq
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:20 AM PT

Democracy: Lawmakers in Iraq reached a crucial milestone this week by approving provincial elections. This is more evidence for the “reconciliation” that Barack Obama claims not to see.

Good news is no news these days, especially when it comes from Iraq. So you might have missed the story about the political breakthrough in the Iraqi parliament, which approved legislation to hold a new round of provincial elections early next year.

The bill — which awaits approval by a three-person presidential council — is important because it sets up the first provincial vote in four years and because the voting promises to be more inclusive than before.

Sunni Iraqis largely boycotted the earlier provincial elections out of mistrust toward the Shiite-dominated national government. The vote did nothing to stop the insurgency and may actually have made it worse.

Now most of the Sunnis have turned against violence, cast their lot with the democratic process and are ready to take a larger role in the national life. “The coming elections will change the Iraqi political map,” said one Sunni lawmaker.

This is the key point: They will change the map peacefully — not through car bombs, but through the ballot box.

Dare we say that democracy is advancing in Iraq? And isn’t this a shining example of the “reconciliation” that Barack Obama, among others, still claims to be waiting for?

Obama admitted earlier this month that President Bush’s troop surge had succeeded “beyond our wildest dreams” in reducing violence. But he insisted that it had yet to produce the desired political dividends.

This week’s vote is dramatic evidence that reconciliation is well under way. And it’s not happening just in parliament. It’s also out on the street. Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter who recently returned to Iraq after two years, bears witness to that fact.

“At first, I didn’t recognize the place,” he wrote. “When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope.”

It’s hard to argue against this eyewitness reporting, especially from a paper that has harshly criticized the Bush administration every step of the way. If only out of honesty and fairness, the president’s critics should acknowledge the success of his courageous decision to step up the fight in Iraq, against the advice of most of his generals.

With the U.S. economy on life support, it may be inevitable that Bush gets little credit these days for this long-awaited success in Iraq. He’ll probably have to wait for the historians to give him his due . . . .

John McCain hammered Obama yesterday on Iraq: “For a guy who talks so much about hope, he didn’t hold out much hope for victory in Iraq. Instead, he commits the greatest error of insisting that even in hindsight, he would oppose the surge.”

McCain linked Obama’s failure of hope on Iraq to his failure to lead in the current economic crisis:

“Whether it’s a reversal in war, or an economic emergency, he reacts as a politician and not as a leader, seeking an advantage for himself instead of a solution for his country,” McCain said.

McCain told the National Guard Association that he had offered a plan to resolve the debt meltdown which triggered the crisis, while the Democratic presidential candidate had not.

“Senator Obama has declined to put forth a plan of his own. At a time of crisis, when leadership is needed, Senator Obama has simply not provided it,” McCain said.

“We saw the same lack of leadership on Iraq. Because of the sacrifices and perseverance of all the troops — active-duty, Guard, and Reserve — victory in Iraq is in sight.

“My opponent, Senator Obama, likes to say that the surge in Iraq was more successful than anyone could have predicted at the time.

“He said that the surge succeeded, ‘beyond our wildest dreams’ — that’s his way of saying that it took him by surprise.”

Kipling once described how a real man acts in the midst of chaos: “If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . . Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”

In Why The Surge Worked, Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) credits President Bush for keeping his head when everyone around him, including the Joint Chiefs, were losing theirs.

. . . Donald Rumsfeld and the senior generals pushed a “short-war” scenario, “which was to get a political solution quickly, transition to the Iraqis security quickly, and get out,” says Gen. Keane. “It didn’t work. And why didn’t it work? Because the enemy voted and they took advantage. The fact that we did not adjust to what the enemy was doing to us and the Iraqis were not capable of standing by themselves — that was our major failure. . . . It took us all a while to understand the war and [that] we had the wrong strategy to fight it. Where I parted from those leaders [at the Pentagon] is when we knew the facts — and the facts were pretty evident in 2005 and compelling in 2006 — and those facts were simply that we could not protect the population and the levels of violence were just out of control.”

In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.

Even Gen. Keane didn’t expect the new strategy to work so fast. “It’s a stunning turnaround, and I think people will study it for years because it’s unparalleled in counterinsurgency practice,” he says. “All the gains we’ve achieved against al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iranians in the south are sustainable” — a slight pause here — “if we’re smart about it and not let them regroup and get back into it.”

. . . The surge turned things around on another difficult front, Washington. “Despite the fact that President Bush did preside over a strategy that was failing for three plus years, and he has been criticized for that,” says Gen. Keane, “he also deserves a significant amount of credit because all around him people were advocating a failed strategy, particularly key leaders around him, and he had the wherewithal to make a tough decision that flew certainly in the face of political opposition even in his own party.”

God bless the Leader of the Free World. It’s a little more free today because he kept his head when all around him were losing theirs.

Recently, Barack Obama was forced to admit that the surge worked beyond his wildest dreams.

Now it’s the New York Times turn. NYT reporter Dexter Filkins ventured back to Iraq after two years away. He was jarred by the calm.

Filkins paints a vivid picture of a serene city that he could not have imagined just 25 months ago:

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

If this isn’t peace, I don’t know what is:

And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes — one-sixth of all Iraqis — are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still . . . .

Standing in the middle of the downtown, I found myself disoriented. I had been here before — I was certain — but still I couldn’t recognize the place. Two summers ago, when I’d last been in Ramadi, the downtown lay in ruins. Only one building stood then, the Anbar provincial government center, and the Americans were holding onto it at all cost. For hundreds of yards in every direction, everything was destroyed; streets, buildings, cars, even the rubble had been ground to dust. Ramadi looked like Dresden, or Grozny, or some other obliterated city. Insurgents attacked every day.

And then, suddenly, I realized it: I was standing in front of the government center itself. It was sporting a fresh concrete facade, which had been painted off-white with brownish trim. Over the entrance hung a giant official seal of Anbar Province. The road where I stood had been recently paved; it was black and smooth. The rubble had been cleared away. American marines were walking about, without helmets or flak jackets or even guns.

In the crowd, I saw a face I recognized. It was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security advisor. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. Mr. Rubaie is a warm, garrulous man, a neurologist who spent years in London before returning to Iraq. But he is also a Shiite, and a member of Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which, in 2005 and 2006, was accused of carrying out widespread atrocities against Iraq’s Sunnis. Anbar Province is almost entirely Sunni.

As Mr. Rubaie made his way through the crowd, I noticed he was holding hands with another Iraqi man, a traditional Arab gesture of friendship and trust. It was Brig. Gen. Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the province — a Sunni.

Sunni and Shia holding hands? Sounds alot like reconciliation.

And who’s to thank? The American soldier, of course.

Sadiya Salman’s four sons and their families, for instance, returned home to Adamiyah recently after two years away. I found them crowded into their small, dimly-lit home in Zhrawaya, Adamiyah’s only Shiite neighborhood.

Like so many other of Baghdad’s mixed neighborhoods, Zhrawaya was the scene of terrifying sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007. As Shiites in predominantly Sunni Adamiyah, the Salman brothers — Wajdi, Luay, Rushdi and Feraz — considered themselves likely targets.

Then came the men in black masks one day, who spray-painted a warning on the wall: “Rafida,” Arabic for “rejectionist.” It is a derogatory word that some militant Sunnis use for Shiites.

And so the brothers left, taking their wives and children with them, 13 in all. Ms. Salman, an intense and energetic woman of 68 years, stayed behind with her four daughters; as a female, she felt safe.

. . . In the 24 months that her sons were gone, Ms. Salman said she rarely ventured outside. The exception, she said, was when she saw American soldiers.

“Oh, I love them,” Ms. Salman said, brightening in her darkened house. “I always knew I was safe with them.”

With life returning to normal in Adamiyah, the Salman brothers and their families recently returned . . . .

Filkins asked a strange question at the outset: If this is peace or victory, is it for the Iraqis or the Americans? Based on his report, I’d say both.

God bless the American military and the courageous people of Iraq.

This should be page 1 headline of every American newspaper but, alas, leave it to the Brits:

From The Sunday Times
July 6, 2008

Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda
By Marie Colvin in Mosul

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

Even in the district of Zanjali, previously a hotbed of the insurgency, it was possible to accompany an Iraqi colonel on foot through streets of breeze-block houses studded with bullet holes. Hundreds of houses were searched without resistance but no bomb was found, only 60kg of explosives.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

“They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it,” Maliki said. “But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them.”

The number of foreign fighters coming over the border from Syria to bolster Al-Qaeda’s numbers is thought to have declined to as few as 20 a month, compared with 120 a month at its peak.

Brigadier General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “We’ve limited their movements with check-points. They are doing small attacks and trying big ones, but they’re mostly not succeeding.”

Major-General Mark Hertling, American commander in the north, said: “I think we’re at the irreversible point.”

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have written the book the Dems deserve: Party of Defeat.

In an excellent review at NRO, Andy McArthy observes that it was the Clinton/Gore administration who made regime change in Iraq official American policy. But after the invasion, the Dems flipped:

So why the treacherous flip-flop? In an ad horrendum indictment that piles fact onto sordid fact, Messrs. Horowitz and Johnson convincingly demonstrate that the modern Democrat leadership is singularly dedicated to delegitimizing and thus destroying the Bush presidency. Having calculated this political strategy, they are heedless of the fact that their tireless opposition, distortion, and propaganda can only lead to the defeat of the United States in what the authors aptly call the war with Islamofascism. In fact, many in the hard Left desire just that outcome. With both Bush and the America that he symbolizes as their targets, no betrayal is off the table.

David Horowitz, of course, is among the most gifted and consequential writers in the conservative movement — particularly insightful when diagnosing the Left’s bare-knuckles, will-to-power arsenal because he came of age in the radical orb. Ben Johnson is the managing editor of the feisty Frontpage Magazine, which is published online daily by Horowitz’s Freedom Center. In Party of Defeat, they recount “unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress.” Describing and documenting the thrall in which the radical Left now holds the Democratic Party, the authors forcefully argue that the resulting “house divided” may lack the unity of national purpose necessary to defeat the perilous threat of jihadism.

The descent of a great political party — one whose determined patriotism was critical to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — has been as predictable as it is disheartening. Many of today’s prominent Leftists were, in the sixties and seventies, heavily influenced by Soviet practices. The authors note that Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet intelligence official to defect to the West, has explained that “[s]owing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks” of his office. A president cannot rally the public to any great national cause if he becomes the object of distrust and ridicule. Propaganda campaigns toward that end were a Soviet priority.

And so it has been with President Bush. The authors recount that as the 2000 election controversy raged in Florida, Jesse Jackson thundered, “We will delegitimize Bush, discredit him, do whatever it takes but never accept him.” In short, the president’s ascendancy was bastardized from the start, long before 9/11 and Bush’s vigorous response to it gave vent to all the Left’s Vietnam-ized predispositions against the use of American power to further American purposes.

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Fred and Kim Kagan on How Prime Minister Maliki Pacified Iraq in the WSJ:

How Prime Minister Maliki Pacified Iraq
By KIMBERLY KAGAN and FREDERICK W. KAGAN
June 10, 2008; Page A17

America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The “near-strategic defeat” of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government’s security forces over illegal Shiite militias, including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the political process builds momentum.

These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.

By February 2008, America and its partners accomplished a series of tasks thought to be impossible. The Sunni Arab insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq were defeated in Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad provinces, and the remaining leaders and fighters clung to their last urban outpost in Mosul. The Iraqi government passed all but one of the “benchmark” laws (the hydrocarbon law being the exception, but its purpose is now largely accomplished through the budget) and was integrating grass-roots reconciliation with central political progress. The sectarian civil war had ended.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), swelled by 100,000 new recruits in 2007, was fighting hard and skillfully throughout Iraq. The Shiite-led government was showing an increasing willingness to use its forces even against Shiite militias. The announcement that provincial elections would be held by year’s end galvanized political movements across the country, focusing Iraq’s leaders on the need to get more votes rather than more guns.

Three main challenges to security and political progress remained: clearing al Qaeda out of Mosul; bringing Basra under the Iraqi government’s control; and eliminating the Special Groups safe havens in Sadr City. It seemed then that these tasks would require enormous effort, entail great loss of life, and take the rest of the year or more. Instead, the Iraqi government accomplished them within a few months.

- Mosul: After losing in central Iraq, remnants of al Qaeda and Baathist insurgents were driven north. These groups started to reconstitute in Mosul as the last large urban area open to them. Mosul also contained financial networks that had funded the insurgency, was a waypoint for foreign fighters infiltrating from Syria, and has ethno-sectarian fault lines that al Qaeda sought to exploit.

The Iraqi government responded by forming the Ninewah Operations Command early in 2008, concentrating forces around Mosul, and preparing for a major clearing operation. In February, the ISF cleared the neighborhoods of Palestine and Sumer, two key al Qaeda safe havens.

In the meantime, American forces conducted numerous raids against the terrorist network, netting hundreds of key individuals. The ISF launched Operation Lion’s Roar on May 10. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited Mosul on May 14, and the ISF began Operation Mother of Two Springs shortly thereafter.

The results have been dramatic. Enemy attacks fell from an average of 40 per day in the first week of May to between four and six per day in the following two weeks. Coalition forces have captured or killed the al-Qaeda emirs of Mosul, Southeast Mosul, Ninewah Province and much of their networks.

Mr. Maliki announced a $100 million reconstruction package for Mosul on May 17 and dispatched an envoy on May 29 to oversee the distribution of funds. Security progress was made possible in part by the enrollment of 1,000 former members of the Iraqi Army. They were part of the revision of the de-Baathification policy legislated by the Iraqi Parliament earlier in the year.

- Basra: Al Qaeda’s defeat in 2007 exposed Iranian-backed Special Groups and Shiite militias as the most important sources of violence and casualties. The Maliki government had shown its willingness to target Sunni insurgents, but many feared it would not challenge Iran’s proxies and the Sadrist militias within which they functioned. Basra, in particular, seemed an almost insurmountable problem following the withdrawal of British combat forces from the city. This left Iraq’s second-largest city (and only port) in the hands of rival militias.

Iraqi and American commanders began planning for a gradual effort to retake the city. Mr. Maliki decided not to wait. Read the rest of this post »

Fouad Ajami, professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University, reminds us today in the WSJ “Why We Went to Iraq”:

Why We Went to Iraq
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 4, 2008

Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: “In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came.”

. . . (After 9/11) [t]he nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America’s grief, taunted its power.

We don’t need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the “charities” that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

We should give the “theorists” of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration.

There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that there are indeed wars of “necessity.” A case can always be made that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky ways of peace and of daily life.

“Wars are not self-starting,” the noted philosopher Michael Walzer wrote in his seminal book, “Just and Unjust Wars.” “They may ‘break out,’ like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims.”

Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush’s war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq’s disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.

It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to “sell” the war. Read the rest of this post »

More good news in the war on terror. Predator drones–and Coalition forces–are decapitating the Taliban in Afghanistan:

A member of 2 Scots acquires a personal escort as he patrols the town of Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province.

Afghan insurgents ‘on brink of defeat’
By Thomas Harding in Lashkar Gah
Last Updated: 10:31PM BST 01/06/2008

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have “decapitated” the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a “tipping point”, the commander of British forces has said.

The new “precise, surgical” tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the “very effective targeted decapitation operations” that have removed “several echelons of commanders”.

This in turn has left the insurgents on the brink of defeat, the head of Task Force Helmand said . . . .