Talking Points

Iraq: The drop in violence is real

Something intriguing is happening in Iraq, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Last month, Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony before Congress inspired a furious debate over whether the recent troop surge of 30,000 additional soldiers had brought about a drop in violence. A mere month later, however, “there isn’t much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures.” Multiple independent sources have concluded that Iraqi civilian casualties dropped sharply in September—down 52 percent from

August, and 77 percent from September 2006. At the same time, U.S. combat deaths were down 43 percent, reaching the lowest monthly

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total in more than a year. “This doesn’t necessarily mean the war is being won,” but the simple fact that violence is declining in Iraq, for whatever reason, is becoming increasingly “hard to dispute.”

Hard to dispute, yes. But for the liberal media, said Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it’s even harder to admit. If news organizations

have reported the drop in violence at all, most have buried the story, while continuing to insist that Iraq is in a “civil war” so complex that statistics

are meaningless. Not so. Casualties have plummeted because U.S. soldiers and our Sunni allies have recently inflicted “devastating losses” on al Qaida in Iraq, which has been responsible for many of the suicide and car bombs that have killed thousands. In recent months, said Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post, hundreds of jihadists have been killed or

captured, and the terrorist organization’s supplies, financing, and hiding places have dwindled. Al Qaida in Iraq has been so “crippled,” in fact, that some generals are telling the White House that it might be time for a public “declaration of victory over the group.”

“A one-month decline in violence does not signal a trend,” said the Palm Beach, Fla., Post. Even if it did, the stated purpose of the surge was to buy time for the bitterly opposed factions of Nouri al-Maliki’s fledgling government to hammer out a power-sharing agreement. That goal remains as far off as ever, with the Kurds now signing oil contracts in defiance of the central government. The latest “turning point” will prove to be as illusory as all the previous ones, said Seumas Milne in the London Guardian.

The U.S.’s Sunni “allies” are telling anyone who asks that once they’ve expelled the foreign invaders of al Qaida, they’ll turn their attention

back to the foreign invaders from the U.S. The notion that things are finally looking up in Iraq is “wishful thinking on a grand scale.”