Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

If you read closely, you’ll find buried in today’s New York Times the suggestion that things are indeed better in Iraq:

When sectarian violence soared in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan, or moved to safer areas in Iraq. But now that the American troop reinforcement plan and a new counterinsurgency strategy have helped reverse a rising tide of car bombings and sectarian killings, there are signs that Iraqis are starting to return.

Perhaps you missed the significance of this sentence because the word “surge” was missing?

Well, never mind, because “the surge is working,” says Congressman Jack “Let’s Cut and Run” Murtha. And, The Politico reports with glee, this could cause problems for the Dems.

Are you surprised that the absence of bad news coming out of Iraq is being read as good news by the public? You shouldn’t be, if you read my post just the other day. And you definitely wouldn’t be surprised about the better news coming out if Iraq if you’d been reading Engram’s blog for the past couple of months.

The public, as usual, is way ahead of our distinguished elected representatives.

So now the Dems are scrambling to position themselves as they realize that once again they’ve been caught by surprise.

The apparent shift in voter intensity about Iraq, also captured in some polls, shows how dramatically the political context of the war debate has changed from last summer.

Democrats believed then that mounting public pressure would soon force Republicans to take flight from President Bush, allowing Congress to impose a more rapid end to the war on an unwilling administration. It has not happened yet, and if anything it shows Democrats are facing a stiffer challenge at year’s end than they had at the beginning to frame the public debate on their terms. 

One Republican put it a little bit differently:

“Democrats made a strategic calculation last January that has proven to be dead wrong,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Their message of failure and retreat makes little sense in light of our troops’ remarkable progress, and the American people are responding to their successes.”

Well, yeah. Sorta.

What’s actually happening is that the changes for the better on the ground in Iraq are making way for a narrative of success. Which is of course something different from success.

But in the war against Islamist fanaticism, where the most important battles are fought in the media, a narrative of success for America matters. A lot.