Iraq: Signs of real progress

I guess good news is no news, said Ralph Peters in the New York Post. If you’ve been wondering why, in the past few weeks, the war in Iraq has “magically vanished from the headlines” of most mainstream liberal newspapers, the answer is that the U.S. and our Iraqi allies are winning the war. Last week, Iraqi troops under the direction of much-maligned President Nouri al-Maliki seized back both Basra and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City from the Shiite militias. Joyous locals celebrated as the Iraqi Security Forces restored law and order to yet another part of Iraq. Though it wasn’t widely reported, there were fewer attacks by militants last week than in any seven-day period since March of 2004. Iraq, in other words, is suddenly looking “like a success in the making”—at precisely the wrong moment for the Democratic Party and all those pundits who insist the war cannot be won.

A few small successful skirmishes do not a victory make, said Anna Badkhen in Salon.com. It’s true that one doesn’t see stray dogs feasting on dead bodies in the streets of Baghdad’s religiously mixed neighborhoods the way one did a year ago. Then again, that might be because “there are almost no religiously mixed neighborhoods” anymore, thanks to the sectarian militias’ murderous reign of terror. Al-Maliki may have chased a few rival Shiites underground, but under his “feeble” leadership, most Iraqis still are living without electricity, running water, and jobs. If Iraqi security forces are finally engaging the rampaging militias, said Sean Duggan in The Boston Globe, it’s only because they know President Bush’s “open-ended” commitment of U.S. soldiers is about to end. The recent progress in Iraq validates, not undermines, the argument for withdrawal. “Indeed, the United States must begin to withdraw in order to capitalize on this development.”

Nice try, said Peter Wehner in National Review Online. Critics of the war are now so “deeply wed to their defeatist narrative” that they will allow no new fact or change of circumstances to interfere with their conviction that “America is failing in Iraq.” But we aren’t failing. We’re succeeding, not only in advancing our own “national security interests” but in bringing peace and stability to a nation that lived for decades under a wicked tyrant. “That such progress seems to agitate the Left and their anti-war allies,” rather than making them applaud, tells you everything you need to know about the moral validity of their convictions—“and none of it is particularly good.”

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