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.

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 ...

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 ...

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. . . . ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

How is winning a war--the most dominant news story of the last 5 years--relegated to Section B? The Iraqi Upturn Don't look now, but the U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war. Sunday, June 1, 2008; B06 THERE'S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks -- which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington's attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the ...

Ralph Peters takes the defeatists like Obama and Clinton to task with the facts of war and then concludes: . . . If we nonetheless quit Iraq in 2009, the defeated remnants of al Qaeda will be able to declare victory, after all. The organization will be able to re-launch itself as the great Muslim victor over the Great Satan. We'll have thrown away a potentially decisive triumph and revived the fortunes of the fanatics who brought us 9/11. And the above only detailed the defeat of al Qaeda. Far more is happening in Iraq, all of it good: Muqtada al-Sadr and his thugs have suffered a series of lopsided defeats; Muqtada's hiding in Iran, afraid to return; ...