I thought I’d try to continue to bring you tidbits of real information while the rest of the Western world tunes in to The Perils of Palin, I was delighted to come across a BBC interview with General David Petraeus, who had a lot to say about Iraq [e.a.]:

Leaving his post, [Petraeus] said there were “many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems”.
Overall he summed up the situation as “still hard but hopeful”, saying that progress in Iraq was “a bit more durable” but that the situation there remained fragile.
He said he did not know that he would ever use the word “victory”: “This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not war with a simple slogan.”
He said al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray its jihad in Iraq as going well were “disingenuous”. It was, in fact “going poorly”, he said.
Of his strategy of establishing joint security stations in key locations, Gen Petraeus said that “you can’t secure the people if you don’t live with them”.
He said it was now fair to say that the Iraqis were standing up as US forces stood down. The confidence and capability of Iraqi forces had increased substantially, he said.

Nibras Kazimi examines the implications of our failing to claim victory in Iraq:

Senator Obama has some explaining to do: what does he mean by saying that he would end the war in Iraq? Whereas some aspects of the war seem to indicate that America is at war with itself as the Iraq debate rages in a charged partisan atmosphere, yet it is often the case that wars usually involve more than one side. So who is America at war with in Iraq? And is the enemy willing to end the war, and under what conditions?

Then there is another existential conundrum that Mr. Obama needs to contend with: how does one go about ending a war that, for all intents and purposes, is already over.

I hear my readers screaming: Whaddaya mean the war is over? Let Kazimi explain [e.a.]:

[The jihadists] thought they were building an empire in Iraq, the caliphate that Mr. bin Laden was always harping on about but never got the nerve to attempt. It was to be the realization of their dream, the same vision for which they launched the September 11, 2001, attacks and the mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq.

And now that they have been defeated in Iraq — anyone saying otherwise is either clueless or being purposely mendacious — America has in fact achieved something far greater than a military victory: America’s soldiers have smashed the nascent state of the caliphate; the dream is no more. This is a fate far worse than death for the jihadists, who enthusiastically embrace dying for their cause of resurrecting an Islamic empire as a noble act of martyrdom. Should Mr. bin Laden be killed or captured, then he would remain an undiminished hero in their eyes; while Americans may think that this would count as victory, the jihadists may simply shrug it off. However, seeing their state collapse in Iraq is their own nadir of demoralization and ideological defeat.

Kazimi also explains the ramifications of failing to declare defeat of the enemy [e.a.]:

The enemy has been defeated before it and its aims have been defined; now that’s quite an auspicious outcome. But it is also a dangerous one, since important lessons need to be learned before the enemy regroups and reengages on newer fronts.

The new fronts will be in Europe, Kazimi says. How does he know? Well, he reads the enemy’s writings. What a concept!

Read the whole thing.

And remember that the brilliant and persistent professor-blogger Engram has reached the same conclusion (via different means)—that the enemy [al Qaeda] has been defeated in Iraq.

Not that we’ll have an easy time convincing the American people of this basic fact—that we have achieved victory over Al Qaeda in Iraq (because, as the NYT notes today, America has turned inward, a fact reflected in the change in foreign news coverage in just the last three years [e.a.]:

Almost two-thirds of American newspapers publish less foreign news than they did just three years ago, nearly as many print less national news, and despite new demands on newsrooms like blogs and video, most of them have smaller news staffs, according to a new study. …

Sixty-four percent of the newspapers reported cutting the space given to foreign news over three years, making that the area that has suffered at the most papers as the business contracts. Only 10 percent of the editors said they considered foreign news “very essential” to their papers.

Really? Because we Americans are so special that we don’t need to know what’s happening elsewhere … Right?

Well maybe we’ll get “lucky” and the next really bad thing will happen far away, in Europe.

What? You’ve never heard of Europe?

Well, it’s the place that the Obama Messiah visited back in July 2008.

Remember?

Spencer Ackerman attended the hearings of “war criminal” Doug Feith today and left deeply unsatisfied:

About an hour ago, I followed Doug Feith on his way out of the Rayburn Building as he tried to flag a cab down on Independence Avenue to escape the women of Code Pink. “Torturer!” they yelled. “War Criminal!” Feith had a small retinue of Capitol Police officers to protect him from the five or so ladies — one Hill cop instructed a Pinker that she couldn’t unfurl an anti-Feith banner in a Rayburn “vestibule” even though she was clearly outside — and they shrugged off suggestions that they should arrest Feith for crimes against the Constitution. Feith, for his part, bit his lip and tried to ignore the yelling. But the cab took forever to come. “War criminal!” “Torturer!” No response. …

Jesus, I thought. Isn’t that enough, ladies? The cab came. Feith got in and sped away. Code Pink dispersed. But I kept thinking about it. Good Lord. To be called a war criminal everywhere you go, for ever and –

Then I came to my senses. Yes, the yelling was obnoxious. But Feith shares responsibility for the most disastrous U.S. war in 35 years; for abandoning the fate of a different U.S. war far more central to U.S. national security; and for creating and implementing an architecture of torture. Over 4700 Americans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. al-Qaeda is materially stronger, as an organization and as a broader movement, as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. And the worst he’ll ever have to endure is five women in pink screaming at him the obvious truth about what he is? It doesn’t even out.

That, plus his book got no play in the media.

What were you thinking Feith should endure, Spencer? (Man up, man. You’re much, much smarter than this.)

Arianna Huffington thinks Barack Obama needs more sleep, and that perhaps if he got it, he’d stop straying from his core message. (And she also claims that this is not a critique from the left; she’s lying (you knew that, right?), because on June 30 she wrote a post titled “Moving to the Middle Is for Losers” and we know she’s no longer a Republican insider and right-wing harridan but rather a Democratic operative and left-wing propagandist):

He needs to remain true to himself — and, above all, to make it clear that he will not lead by sticking his finger in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing.

Too late, Arianna dear! Barry hasn’t only changed his stripes on Iraq and the surge—he has rewritten history!

Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a “problem” that had barely reduced violence.

“The surge is not working,” Obama’s old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks - not U.S. military muscle - for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

Barry’s “plan for Iraq” gets thorough responses here and here.

Hitchens demolishes the let’s-leave-Iraq-and-fight-”them”-in-Afghanistan argument here.

Bonus reading: Joe Klein is sticking to his “Iraq was a disaster“ story.

Please note: I’m not saying Iraq hasn’t been a disaster. Indeed it has been—and continues to be—a disaster and a half. But thanks to the shift to the surge, thanks to Petraeus-style counterinsurgency, and, yes, thanks to George W. Bush’s stubbornness in seeing it through (despite getting the bum’s rush from his father’s closest pals), I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (far, far, far away).

I can also see that Iraq will be a losing issue for Barack Obama, whose judgment was so prescient that it had to be erased from his website. Via Gateway Pundit:

Here is Obama’s website before the scrubbing this weekend:

This previous page said: “The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq’s political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq’s civil war.”

And, here is Obama’s current webpage on Iraq and the surge:

And, now… Voila!– *poof* –No more civil war!

Which is why he’s doing the fancy soft-shoe routine now. I also don’t think it’ll help much. Americans like him, but they really don’t like him as commander-in-chief.

One reason McCain can push back on Iraq is his advantage as commander-in-chief — a striking one, albeit perhaps not surprising given his military background. Seventy-two percent of Americans — even most Democrats — say he’d be a good commander-in-chief of the military.

By contrast, fewer than half, 48 percent, say Obama would be a good commander-in-chief, a significant weakness on this measure. (McCain’s rating is much improved from his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, when 56 percent said he’d be a good commander-in-chief — no more than said so, at the time, about George W. Bush.) [e.a.]

I’m sure you’ve also been wondering about where Obama’s number-one fan stands on all this flip-flopping, waffling, rewriting of history, and purging of his website. Sullivan has got no comment about any of that. Of course, he’s no longer declaring defeat in Iraq, as he did when he endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican nomination. But he’s still banking on the wisdom of the Obama Messiah (who’s right even when he’s wrong):

[J]udging now what we should be doing next February is foolish. Our choice will be rooted in a core judgment of whether Obama’s instincts will be better than McCain’s - in blending the diplomacy, military tactics and strategic vision to win the war on terror.

Arianna Huffington is disappointed that the surge has worked well enough to give Americans the impressions that things have improved in Iraq [e.a.]:

John McCain, aided and abetted by his loving protectors in the media, is running a victory lap on Iraq. To hear them tell it, the surge has “worked” — indeed, it has been a huge success — and this, like a last second Hail Mary pass, has vindicated the entire disastrous Iraq misadventure.

Buoyed by a reduction in violence in Iraq, war supporters are crawling out from the shadows and beating their chests.

“I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Condi Rice told Judy Woodruff last week. This echoed the comments of her boss, who crowed at a GOP awards dinner at the end of June: “The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision at the time, and it is the right decision today.” Bush even felt emboldened to dust off blast from the past and claim: “Democracy is taking root where a tyrant once ruled.”

And the media — and even a number of Democrats — are swallowing this triumphalist nonsense whole, and washing it down with a pitcher of revisionist Kool-Aid. The result: a collective case of political amnesia.

Arianna dear: most of us want to forget about Iraq. You’ll need to find another line of attack against McCain. Back to the drawing board for you.

It’s amusing to see America’s best-known pundits adjust course as they grapple with a new reality—namely, the unlikely improvements in Iraq.

The other day, David Brooks laid down the gauntlet, declaring that Bush was not only to be reviled for his stubborn insistence on doing things his way but also admired for that same trait, because it seems to have paid off in Iraq (despite his horrible bumbling).

before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.

In response to Brooks’s challenge, yesterday, Joe Klein declared the surge a success, declared himself wrong for having opposed it, and declared himself a worshipper at the altar of counterinsurgency and “new Jesus” Gen. David Petraeus.

I happily acknowledge that I was wrong about the surge. As regular Swampland readers know, I was, and am, a huge fan of counterinsurgency doctrine, and an admirer of David Petraeus–but I doubted that the General would have the time, troops or a coherent local government–in other words, the metrics required by his own doctrine–to make it work.

He also declared himself one of the (few)”good Jews” (and distanced himself from a vast cabal of evil “Jewish neocons” who pushed Bush into war in Iraq to make the world safe for Israel):

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked–still smacks–of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

And to play it safe with the anti-capitalists, he also declared himself a firm “no blood for oil” guy:

And then there is the question–made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis–of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

We’ll see whether these self-declarations help or hurt Klein with the folks he’s trying to impress (his inside-the-Beltway crowd).

Today, Thomas Friedman adds his voice to those who are starting to acknowledge the improvements in the Iraqi landscape. He manages to credit them almost entirely to the Iraqis, giving Bush a scant mention and saying nary a word about Petraeus and the hundreds of thousands of or American troops who have worked to end the conflict[e.a.]:

One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them. It’s one reason they never threw flowers. When someone else has to liberate you in your own home, that is humiliating — and humiliation, I believe, is the single-most underestimated force in international relations, especially in the Middle East.

…What seems to have happened in Iraq in the last few months is that the Iraqi mainstream has finally done some liberating of itself. With the help of the troop surge ordered by President Bush, the mainstream Sunni tribes have liberated themselves from the grip of Al Qaeda in their provinces. And the Shiite mainstream — represented by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Army — liberated Basra, Amara and Sadr City in Baghdad from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads.

We may one day look back on this as Iraq’s real war of liberation. The one we led five years ago didn’t count.

Like Friedman, I also have thought about the notion of self-liberation. In October 2006, I wrote:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, during which students, patriots, poets, workers, and intellectuals tried to throw off the totalitarian Russian yoke and died in their thousands as they faced off against Soviet tanks, it’s a question I must ask as a supporter of America’s effort to liberate Iraq from Saddam:

Where are the Iraqi freedom fighters?

Well, those freedom fighters—or something an awful lot like them—have emerged … thanks to the protection, backup, encouragement, teaching, training, and moral support they have received from the American military, and thanks to the great sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of American troops who have given their lives, their limbs, their souls, and their hearts to the effort to help a beaten-down people liberate themselves.

It’s a thankless job, which is something that most people who sign up for the military know in advance: they won’t get glory, because in our culture we don’t glorify war, or even service to our nation. That’s the way it is, and everyone knows it. They sign up and serve anyway, each one for his or her own reasons.

Also, while I think Friedman is grievously callous wrong and ignoble to ignore the contribution of the American military (not to mention the American president) to the recent (fragile) successes in Iraq, he may in fact be right to give the Iraqis the lion’s share of the credit.

The whole idea of the undertaking in Iraq was that the country would eventually serve as a positive role model for what can happen for the Muslim Arabs (and Persians) of the Middle East if they sign on to liberating themselves. It will be a good long while before Iraq is considered any kind of success, but as the successes start to overshadow the images of blood and bombs and fires and panic and rage and unimaginable sorrow, there will be a lot of food for thought among the Muslim Arabs and Persians of the Middle East. Eventually, they’ll see free Iraqis electing representatives to manage the affairs of their state, and they’ll wonder why they allow religious and political tyrants or monarchs rule over every aspect of their lives.

Robert Kaplan has good advice for Barack Obama:

[SecDef] Gates, who initially opposed the war, is fighting it with more gusto than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who supported the invasion.

This is not uncommon. Army Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker were likely not avid supporters of the invasion either, but both are now working not just to get America out of Iraq with our honor intact, but to win there. Sen. John McCain, who was cool to both the insertion of forces in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo in the 1990s, was vigorously in favor of winning those conflicts once troops were committed on the ground.

There is a lesson here for Barack Obama.

Yes. It’s called How to Behave Like the Loyal Opposition . Hint: don’t talk like a retarded Kossack [e.a.].

The Democrats may well be right that the invasion was a strategic mistake that cost us greatly both in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. But their dire predictions from two years ago don’t look very good in hindsight. And so they need to start thinking constructively about Iraq, not destructively. To wit, as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — another opponent of the war — has said, the United States will be known and remembered as much by how it got out of Iraq as by how it got in. Armitage is thinking constructively in a way that Obama and company need to.

It’s good advice. I seriously doubt that most Democratic politicians are thinking constructively about Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that Obama won’t … eventually. For now, though, as Jennifer Rubin points out, he just sounds confused.

The New York Times concedes some ground on Iraq (in an otherwise pissy editorial):

[I]n recent months there has been some tentative progress in Iraq. American and Iraqi casualties have declined, and there are signs that the central government is beginning to assert its authority against Shiite militias in Basra and Sadr City and against allies of Al Qaeda in Mosul.

I am made extremely nervous by anyone who would start crowing about “success” in Iraq (though I understand John McCain’s jumping all over anything positive to come out of the war—and particularly the surge, which, as Jennifer Rubin notes, he patted himself on the back for [emphasis in her original]:

And on Iraq:

Well, we are succeeding. We are winning. The three major cities are now under Iraqi military government control, with our support. Senator Obama incredibly refuses to acknowledge the success. It’s remarkable. Maybe he should sit down with General Petraeus which he has not sought the opportunity to do so far, or maybe even go back to Iraq, which he has not since the surge began. We are succeeding. And that success means we will be able to withdraw over time, gaged by conditions on the ground. . . And we will come home in victory and honor and not in defeat. That is what this choice is going to be about in this election. I said a year ago, over a year ago, I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war. I was right about the surge. Senator Obama was wrong about the surge. [The] American people [can] make an appropriate judgment.

Rubin also reported on a very interesting talk at Brookings by Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon:

O’Hanlon explained that the last three months has been the “spring of the blossoming of Iraqi security forces” and Iraq is on an “impressive trajectory” although we have not yet “reached a stable end point.” He stressed that the 80% reduction in civilian violence was much better than he thought possible. He went through a detailed review of Basra, conceding that Maliki’s actions took the Americans by surprise and that in the first week things went poorly. However, by the second week two brigades were deployed from Al Anbar ( a testimony to massive improvements in Iraq security force logistics) and the mission was successful, allowing the Iraqi army and national police force to now control the streets of Basra.

Pollack echoed these observations, saying that “The headline was the emergence of Iraqi security forces.” He explained that the fundamental shift from Americans leading with Iraqis in support to Iraqis leading not just “hold” but “clear” operations is now “well underway.” He observes that sectarian divisions within the military are receding as mixed Sunni and Shia units have been successful in Basra and Mosul operations. He sees vast improvement in military leadership which “is one of the main reasons for improvement” in the security situation. He credits the military success with allowing for a “fundamental rearrangement” of Iraqi politics, observing that Maliki is now “flying high” with new found respect from Sunnis. The big picture take away, he says, it that having achieved remarkable success with major issues we now can begin to address “second and third order problems” such as insuring that military forces “stay in their lane” and do not subvert civilian leadership.

Pollack and O’Hanlon counsel against hasty withdrawal, but according to Rubin, they were polite in offering Dems a way to save face, and save themselves from “defeatist” branding:

Both indicated that it would be a mistake with critical provincial and national elections upcoming in 2008 and 2009 to begin an abrupt withdrawal in 2009. O’Hanlon offered that Democrats could take credit for having pressured Iraqis on a political front with the clear message that our presence would not be indefinite and that they should accept that “the good news is you may be able to leave earlier than proposed based on progress and not on defeat.”

We’ll see how this goes over when the blogosphere catches wind of this fairly optimistic picture. The last time Pollack and O’Hanlon stuck out their necks, they were called tools—and much worse.

There’s a new meme in town: namely, that things are improving in Iraq and in the GWOT.

WaPo:

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 Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Funny, but I just wrote about the fact that things seem to be looking up in Iraq! I guess others have noticed—but not the MSM, as Engram notes repeatedly in this post.

Of course Engram has been bird-dogging events in Iraq for a long time, creating graphs and explaining over and over in painstakingly that the reduction in casualties (both Iraqi and American) means that the tide is turning. Admirably and stubbornly, he has continued to make this unpopular case. How he ties it all together:

It seems that we may have already won this unwinnable war. In so doing, we have disconfirmed the world’s most dangerous theory. That theory, which was shared by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alike, was that America’s powerful military was not a force to be feared because the will of the American public could be easily broken with just a bit of bloodshed. That was the lesson these tyrants learned from Vietnam, and the actions of Barack Obama and Harry Reid seemed to confirm that 9/11 did not change anything. The lesson I have learned is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were, to my great surprise, mostly correct. As they thought, most Americans do not have the will to sustain a bloody fight. But I’ve also learned that if the president alone does show that resolve, then that’s all that matters. Now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been crushed, I suspect that they have learned this new lesson as well (well, bin Laden has).

As it turns out, it was al Qaeda, not America, that launched a misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Their great mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan was to think that even George Bush’s will could be broken once the will of the American people began to flag. It was a monumental error on their part. Now, they have lost in Iraq, and they destroyed their reputation throughout the Muslim world because of the strategy they used in their unsuccessful effort to evict American forces. That strategy was to slaughter other Muslims (Shiites) to break the will of the American people instead of directly taking on the U.S. military. It almost worked, but the gamble appears to have failed.

There’s more: because of Al Qaeda’s abhorrent massacres of Muslims, jihadism is losing favor among the world’s Muslims. Newsweek is the latest to report:

Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

As Peter Wehner notes, this jihadism-is-on-the-wane meme has been building recently:

CIA Director Michael Hayden gave a noteworthy interview to the Washington Post this week.

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership. …

…  Hayden’s assessment comes on the heels of important essays by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic arguing that the tide within the Islamic world is turning strongly against al Qaeda and jihadism.

Wisely, Wehner cautions against excessive optimism [e.a.]:

Progress, like setbacks, can be reversed. Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is surely right when he says “Al-Qaeda’s obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory. I agree that there has been progress. But we’re indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy.” And Hayden’s right to warn us that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training, and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents.

Indeed. This would be the “malign influence” that Iran casts over the entire region, according to Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress last week—a claim that was challenged by Sen Jim Webb, who apparently thinks we should go so easy on Iran that we should avoid using displeasing words like “malign. Petraeus disagreed [e.a.]:

WEBB: General Petraeus, there’s some language in response to questions that were submitted to you for the record that go to Iran that I would like to get some clarifcation or give you the opportunity to clarify. You use the word malign as an adjective, as someone who’s written nine books, I’m trying to struggle with how this fits in to what you’re saying here. You say ["]we will continue to expose you the extent of Iran’s malign activity in Iraq,” and then you say on the next page, “our efforts in regard to Iran must involve generating international cooperation and building consensus to counter malign Iranian influence,” and then you speak about its…”there are consequences for its illegitimate influence in the region.” Can you clarify for us…how are you using those words?
PETRAEUS: I can, Senator. What I’m talking about there I am characterizing that influence, it is malign and it is lethal and it is illegitimate. The arming, training, funding, and directing of militia extremists who have killed our soldiers…is very malign indeed it’s the same situation with what they’re doing…

But rather than get all caught up in Iran and other issues in the Middle East—Olmert’s extraordinary meltdown, anybody?—I’d like to reprint at length Peter Wehner’s conclusions about these extraordinary shifts in the geopolitics of the day, and the lesson we should all draw from them:

It’s worth recalling how widely the pendulum has swung in just the last two years. In 2005 and 2006, Iraq, it was said in many quarters, was lost; we either had to beat a hasty retreat or, as Joe Biden and Les Gelb counseled, we needed to separate Iraq into three largely autonomous regions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd). For a time the Biden-Gelb plan was the “hot” one among commentators — the “third way” between leaving Iraq precipitously and foolishly attempting to repair a hopelessly broken and divided society. In fact, we are now seeing precisely the reconciliation and progress that many analysts believed was impossible to achieve.

It was also said by many analysts that as a result of the President’s misguided policies, al Qaeda was growing more popular, terrorist recruitment was up, al Qaeda had been handed great gifts by the Bush administration, and that America was less safe than prior to 9/11. The conventional wisdom was that the “Bush legacy” would be that al Qaeda was much stronger and America was much weaker than before the Iraq war.

Today the pendulum is swinging very much the other way. The reality is that things are much better now then they were at the mid-point of this decade. The cautionary tale in all this may be that we need to resist the temptation to take a snapshot in time and assuming that those things will stay as they are. Two years ago there were reasons for deep concern — but there were not reasons, it turns out, for despair or hopelessness. Events are fluid and can be shaped by human action and human will. While commentators were busy writing obituaries on Iraq, Bush, in the face of gale-force political winds, changed strategies –and Petraeus and company took on the hard task of redeeming Iraq.

Recent events are reminders, too, that equanimity and the capacity for some degree of detachment are important qualities to possess–qualities which are often lacking among those of us who inhabit the world of politics and government and comment on events on a daily or weekly basis.

Indeed.

But detachment and equanimity are, of course, the opposite of what sells on television—which is why cable “news” is 24/7 hysteria.

The evidence is scant, but it’s there:

 

Ali Yussef / AFP/Getty Images

Children jump and run as Iraqi troops arrive in their neighborhood to distribute food rations in the impoverished Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad. Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shiite bastion of Sadr City three days ago for the first time in eight weeks, without resistance from militias who have fought deadly street battles with US forces.

Iraq violence falls to four-year low, U.S. says

The military says crackdowns by the Iraqi government are working, and that the number of attacks has dropped to about 300 a week from 1,600 in June.

The other day in the Times, Bill Kristol quoted a Marine helicopter pilot:

“I was in Iraq from the 2nd to the 12th this month. In my current job I go over there twice a year for two weeks to collect lessons learned and fly a few sorties …

“The biggest deal for me was the fact that even after we have pulled out thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, peace continues to hold in Anbar. In fact, I was shocked by two things when flying over Ramadi and Fallujah. First, the streetlights are back on. It is crazy to see Iraqi cities lit up completely, and since they are all on grid power now, you don’t see the crazy black/brown outs when you fly over and the generators pop like you would back in 2005/6. The power now seems to extend even into the suburbs and light industry on the edges of the major cities as well.

“Second, there are people, regular civilians, walking the streets at night. That was very unusual and got the visitor (me) laughed at when I told our terminal controller that I had personnel walking down a street on the radio.”

Most people would mock such “progress,” and of course they’re right to. No one who refers to it as “progress” would ever consider living under such conditions. It’s the height of arrogance to claim this resumption of some normalcy in some pockets of Iraq as a success. It is only a small half-step up from the hell unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the “coalition of the willing’s” occupation of an alien country ruled by tribal passions, located in a region little understood by those who made war on it.

This ignorance is evident from what the locals in Basra have told NYT reporter Stephen Farrell, who also reports on progress but (wisely) never uses that word [e.a.]:

With the death squads in hiding and Islamist militias evicted from their strongholds by the Iraqi Army, few doubt that this once-lawless port is in better shape than it was just two months ago. …

Two months after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the military offensive, residents of Basra talk of feeling safer, if not yet entirely safe, after years of oppression by armed gangs and “enforcers” of Shariah, or Islamic law. In the four years that British troops patrolled here, from 2003 to late 2007, the outlaws emerged and preyed on musicians, alcohol sellers, Christians, unveiled women, academics — anyone not embracing their extreme vision of Islam.

Now the shops and restaurants in Basra are open later, and alcohol is back on sale, discreetly. The government’s troops seem to have quelled Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other militias. …

In the inevitable post-mortems, a principal question has been whether the multinational troops in southern Iraq, led by the British, should have rid the city of its gangsters long ago. …

But Iraqis are asking why it didn’t happen years ago …

Aside from the fact that it’s ridiculously impertinent and impudent and nervy for Iraqis to ask why, during the hell on earth that was this war in its early years, the coalition didn’t save them from sharia sooner, it turns out that cultural and demographic differences have played a big role in the outcomes in different parts of Iraq:

[In Basra], mafia-style Shiite gangs rose in an overwhelmingly Shiite town; up north, Sunni and Shiite factions waged civil war in divided cities like Baghdad and Baquba.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the coalition forces didn’t know before launching the war.

There’s also the little matter of cultural differences between the British and the Americans:

“I have been very frustrated at the British,” said Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber, a police commander in Basra. He said the British “gave a high priority to their own security” and “were not forceful with the cases they faced in the street.”

It is a common criticism. “The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British,” one Iraqi soldier complained.

And then there’s the cultural difference between Iraqis and free Westerners—the one you’re not allowed to say in public in the West without being accused of being a neocon or a warmonger. That same Iraqi soldier elaborated on his complaint, and made an observation [e.a.]:

““The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British. Our people need a powerful force, not a weak one. We had just left Saddam Hussein behind. How could anyone be soft after that?”

That’s a good question, particularly as it relates to electoral politics in America in 2008, where one (presumptive) candidate consistently appears soft and the other one doesn’t.

As you will have noticed, I’m neither running for public office nor interested in a position in the punditocracy or the commentariat. If I were, I’m sure I’d have to think about the appropriate time and place to exercise vigorous public self-criticism and self-flagellation and renounce and reject and denounce my agreement in 2003 with the decision of our Asshole in Chief to topple Saddam Hussein.

In fact, though, I do not renounce my decision. Considering what we knew and feared at the time—and considering the way that Saddam reacted to the pressure placed on him (evasively)—it seemed like the right decision. I have no reason now to second-guess what was my best judgment at the time (which is one reason I support Hillary Clinton; she thinks the same was I do about t his—and she has a lot more to lose and still she has stuck to her guns ***).

Yesterday, on 60 Minutes, one of the architects of the war, Doug Feith, spoke to Steve Croft:

Kroft begins by asking, “Why did the United States invade Iraq?” Feith responds, “The President decided that the threats from the Saddam Hussein regime were so great that if we had left him in power, we would be fighting him down the road, at a time and place of his choosing.”

If Feith doesn’t look or sound much like a warrior that’s because he isn’t; he’s an intellectual, a hawkish, neo-conservative defense policy wonk, who occupied one of the top rungs on the Pentagon ladder, playing a key role in shaping the military’s response to 9/11 and the decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein.

Asked why was the decision made to go after Saddam Hussein after 9/11, when even then, the United States government realized Saddam didn’t have anything to do with the attacks, Feith answers, “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”

Kroft follows up, asking, “So you’re saying you didn’t think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it — more important to go after people who weren’t responsible for it?”

“No,” Feith explains, “I think it was important to go after the people who were responsible for 9/11. But it was also important to disrupt the international terrorist networks and prevent whatever plans there were for follow-on attacks.”

Kroft observes that using those standards, the U.S. could have invaded North Korea or Syria or Iran. Feith concedes the point, but counters that Iraq was a special case, in large part, because of Saddam’s record.

Saddam had already attacked Kuwait, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia; that he had defied the United Nations, evaded economic sanctions, used weapons of mass destruction on his own people and had the know-how, if not the wherewithal, to build a nuclear weapon. Feith believes the U.S. invasion was justifiable as an act of self-defense. In his book, he uses the term “anticipatory self-defense.”

“In an era where WMDs can put countries in a position to do an enormous amount of harm,” he tells Kroft, “the old of idea of having to wait until you actually see the country mobilizing for war doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Whatever you think of Feith’s rationale (and of my support for it!), there’s no question that the next president will encounter the same geopolitical problems and the same terrible uncertainties. That person will get calls at 3 a.m. and at 5 a.m. and at 10 p.m. and at midnight.

Today, Henry Kissinger posits an even scarier scenario—a world situation without precedent:

The long-predicted national debate about national security policy has yet to occur. Essentially tactical issues have overwhelmed the most important challenge a new administration will confront: how to distill a new international order from three simultaneous revolutions occurring around the globe: (a) the transformation of the traditional state system of Europe; (b) the radical Islamist challenge to historic notions of sovereignty; and (c) the drift of the center of gravity of international affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. …

No previous generation has had to deal with different revolutions occurring simultaneously in separate parts of the world. The quest for a single, all-inclusive remedy is chimerical. In a world in which the sole superpower is a proponent of the prerogatives of the traditional nation-state, where Europe is stuck in halfway status, where the Middle East does not fit the nation-state model and faces a religiously motivated revolution, and where the nations of South and East Asia still practice the balance of power, what is the nature of the international order that can accommodate these different perspectives? What should be the role of Russia, which is affirming a notion of sovereignty comparable to America’s and a strategic concept of the balance of power similar to Asia’s? Are existing international organizations adequate for this purpose? What goals can America realistically set for itself and the world community? Is the internal transformation of major countries an attainable goal? What objectives must be sought in concert, and what are the extreme circumstances that would justify unilateral action?

This is the kind of debate we need, not focus-group-driven slogans designed to grab headlines.

———–
*** Michael Tomasky, writing today in the Guardian, says that if and when Hillary finally loses, it will be because of her “refusal to renounce her support of the war,” for which he lays blame at the feet of Mark Penn.

Whatever. The only people who give a shit about which side you were on in the run-up to Iraq are partisan Democrats vying for jobs in Washington and/or the media elite, and of course the whippersnappers, for whom this is the Great Moral Question of the Day.

No one else cares.

Or, rather, you can—but you may not get very far. That’s the gist of this piece from Politico, which analyzes the findings of a Pew poll from late February that a lot of people have overlooked (though not me—see below):

American public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached a high point unseen since the summer of 2006, a development that promises to reshape the political landscape.

According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans — a slim majority — now believe “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.

I don’t put a whole lot of stock in polls, but I do pay some attention to them from time to time. I happen to have seen these poll results, released in late February, before the Ohio and Texas primaries. As Lanny Davis wrote in the HuffPo, the poll clearly indicated Barack Obama’s obvious weakness in the area of national security. It was, I believe, this poll that prompted Hillary Clinton to run the 3 a.m. ad, which was aimed straight at Obama’s Achilles heel as revealed by the poll, as I also wrote at the time.

This Pew poll looks to me to be a leading indicator of where the country is on the issue of Iraq: most people have learned to live with it as a reality, and the urgent insistence that we withdraw our troops and leave the Iraqis to fight “their civil war” has been quelled.

My gut tells me that with the war no longer featured on our TV screens (it doesn’t bleed, so it doesn’t lead—but, as I’ve been saying for months, the American media is obsessed with Campaign ‘08 and impervious to other news), with American casualties way, way down; with suicide bombings and other similar horrors fewer and farther in between; with reports like the ones from CNN reporter Kyra Phillips (about the Iraqi National Theater and an Iraqi women’s sports college and an Iraqi school for the blind), which show normal life in Iraq resuming (on a very minor scale, but still resuming somewhat), Americans are getting the idea that we may indeed have a chance of “winning” in Iraq.

Michael O’Hanlon certainly agrees.

“How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country?” asked Michael O’Hanlon, a national security adviser at the Brookings Institution who has been at the center of the Iraq debate since the war’s outset.

“Thinking about where we were at the time of the congressional elections, it’s ironic that the Iraq issue could actually be the one that most favors the Republican and most other issues — including most foreign policy issues — could most favor the Democrats,” O’Hanlon added. “Yet Democrats keep wanting to fight the Iraq debate.”

I don’t know that Clinton wants to fight the debate, but Obama sure does: it’s the central theme of his candidacy—his supposedly great judgment in deciding that Iraq would be a disaster and so we shouldn’t go in. (In my view, everyone understood—or should have understood—that it would be a disaster; to think otherwise when embarking on a war is the height of ignorance, foolishness, and stupidity. All wars are a disaster. And yet some still need to be fought, to stave off worse disasters down the road.)

I understand that O’Hanlon is deeply unpopular in the leftosphere and among antiwar types—precisely because he dared project a scenario of “success” in Iraq when it was very, very unpopular to do so in Democratic circles.

But, really, the Democrats should listen to him—particularly the candidates. Because they’re behind the times. Also: those who participated in the poll like McCain much, much, much better than either Clinton or Obama for commander in chief:

McCain is betting, however, that the public will view the war through a forward-looking lens. For months, he has argued that Democrats intend to “retreat” in Iraq and ensure failure.

The public may soon come to view that as “a correct narrative,” said O’Hanlon, a Democrat whose views on the war have made him the bête noire of many in the anti-war liberal base.

Perhaps as a result of the uptick in support for the war or his own military record, McCain is well-positioned to retake the party’s traditional advantage on national security issues.

Almost half of registered voters now believe it is “very likely” that McCain would be an “effective commander in chief,” according to CBS polling. Less than one-quarter said the same of Obama and Clinton.

Angelina Jolie recently visited Iraq, and she’s got strong opinions, not to mention a strong moral compass:

My visit left me even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.

Today’s humanitarian crisis in Iraq — and the potential consequences for our national security — are great. Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced people, in the heart of Middle East, won’t explode in violent desperation, sending the whole region into further disorder?

She suggests that the surge has helped create progress that American forces and NGOs can build upon. And she issues a challenge:

I would like to call on each of the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to announce a comprehensive refugee plan with a specific timeline and budget as part of their Iraq strategy.

That’s an excellent idea, even if it does come from a famous femme fatale (who I’ve mocked relentlessly on this blog).

Life is full of surprises. Some overprivileged movie stars turn out to be serious—and seriously bold—people.

There will never be a V-I Day or a parade, but al Qaeda in Iraq will be defeated, because of bad news—and very bad PR—like this.

It is incontrovertible evidence of Sunni Muslim-on-Sunni-Muslim terror and violence:

Analysts say the video shows al Qaeda in Iraq operatives executing nine Sunni men deemed disloyal.

The Iraqis had quite enough of this kind of thing under Saddam, I think. Sooner or later they will find a way to muddle through and live with one another.

Who knew?

On Tuesday night, the nine members of the Berkeley City Council are expected to do something they, or the Marines, for that matter, very rarely do: retreat in the face of fierce opposition. …

[Their] proclamation, which called the Marines “uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” sparked an angry response in the form of hundreds of telephone calls, thousands of e-mail messages and countless hours of “How dare they!” on the radio and elsewhere.

This is one of the cases where not all publicity is good publicity.

Code Pink, seen here in a recent performance,

and other fringe radical groups probably thought it was a good idea for Berkeley to take on the Marines,  to call attention to the continuing war in Iraq, along with their aggressive malice toward anyone they decree responsible for it.

Undoubtedly, they thought they were “safe” doing this on their home turf in Northern California, whose demographic is Nancy Pelosi’s core constituency (the one she was signaling on Sunday when she repeatedly called the surge and Iraq a “failure.“)

Something tells me that this constituency’s “ideas” are going to be tested in the coming months. One straw in the wind is the Berkeley mayor’s cluelessness, and his clumsy attempt to pretend that the city council didn’t launch a frontal attack on the United States armed services as a hostile entity:

Mayor Tom Bates, who was in the Army and seems slightly bewildered by the backlash, said the [new] resolution would be “a substitute for what we’ve had out there.”

“Actually I wouldn’t even call it a substitute,” Mr. Bates said a moment later. “I think it’s just a restating of our policy.”

Somehow, I doubt that Mr. Bates will be allowed to rewrite Berkeley’s history with impunity.

The Council regularly takes up foreign policy and other faraway issues. But even veterans of the scene say the Marine hoopla is one for the books.

Ms. Olds, who voted for the parking spot but not the language about the Marines, said she had never seen such a response. Not that the Council did not deserve it, she added.

“I live in the [Berkeley] hills,” Ms. Olds said. “And they don’t like this one bit.”

I’m pretty sure that the folks who live in the “hills” are rich Democrats—Pelosi’s core constituency. They allow the fringe to represent the views of their party at their own risk.

I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feet at the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.

And, lo and behold, what did I find? That Yglesias’s man Barack Obama went wild at the SOTU last night when Bush put Iran on notice:

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.

One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:

I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.

But can someone tell me what to make of this?

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.

Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.

Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM

A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.

I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)

The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.

But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:

The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.

DIVIDED WE FALL.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM

That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.

Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.

Ya know, I don’t suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Life is too short. And besides—I took one look at him on the campaign trail back in 2000 and immediately remembered the overprivileged Republican WASP dicks I was unfortunate enough to live among (as a not-WASP and not-Republican) during my coming-of-age and pinpointed him as a mean, arrogant, entitled son of a bitch. When Gore (also entitled and overprivileged, but one of “mine”—namely, a Democrat) lost the election that was his to lose and Bush “won,” Bush became for me just one more president to ignore, as I had ignored Reagan for eight long years.

I certainly haven’t been proven wrong. Bush is eminently ignorable, and a mean, arrogant son of a bitch to boot. Nevertheless, after the terrible events of 9/11, I was forced to think long and hard about geopolitics, read as much as I could, and ended up supporting his mission to topple Saddam, liberate the godforsaken Iraqis from Saddam’s evil clutches, and try to bring some semblance and idea of normalcy into the lives of the Muslims of the Middle East. With my family background—born to parents who had suffered the twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism—I could see from far away the totalitarian threat from Islamism.

I believed that the future of our interconnected world was at stake in this fight, that the Enlightened West had to do something to stop the terrible slide into darkness of the Muslim Middle East.

Was I wrong? I don’t know. No one knows, because no one can see ten or twenty years down the road to a time when perhaps things will be different, as they are today for example in Eastern Europe nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So that’s where I stand on Bush: I think he did the right thing in Iraq (regardless of his reasons) but that he blew it, disastrously and at a cost (moral, economic, social) we’ll be carrying for decades. Grimly, I supported the surge, too, having read about Petraeus years earlier. He seemed to have the right stuff to make a difference in Iraq. And indeed there is a small difference in Iraq: al Qaeda is on the ropes and on the run. For now. We seem to have acquired some breathing room, just barely. There is some small hope that the breathing room will grow and that the country that lays in ruins today will somehow, someday rise from the ashes. Maybe.

And then today I read this grotesque happy talk“It’s Morning in America Because Bush is the Best” piece by Bush and Cheney lapdog Ron Christie, which claims that Bush has been a genius and a hero—and that his successes are surging—and I just want to hurl myself off a cliff:

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

Wait. There’s more:

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. …

More Americans have more money in their savings accounts and in their wallets as a result of the Bush tax cuts. …

Roundly criticized back in 2001 for his position on stem cell research, the president’s resolve and strength to draw a moral boundary line to protect innocent unborn life has been vindicated. …

And most deluded of all, a happy picture of Iraq:

This decrease in violence has led thousands of civilians to return to the country each and every day to reopen their schools, businesses and neighborhoods that have long been abandoned due to violence.

In Mosul, the airport opened for the first time in 14 years for commercial aviation flights. In a region of the country long associated with violence, Iraqi Airlines is now open for business. While there is always a potential for violence to flare up, Iraqi civilians have returned home to provinces all around the country that had previously been strongholds held by terrorists and Saddam loyalists.

[e.a.]

I didn’t buy Frank Rich’s argument that Bush went to war in Iraq in order to secure a victory (and thus the 2004 election): there was ample reason to go to war, and many liberals understood those reasons and supported them.

But to hear a former Bush administration lapdog now declare victory is beyond sick-making. Words fail me. Hear me whimper.

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.

[updated to add a link, and to fix garbled syntax]

By now it’s hard to deny that the situation in Iraq seems improved, which is why the New York Times fronts a story about the Democratic candidates’ change of “tone.”

Change of tone? They’re all going to be spinning like tops soon enough.

But that doesn’t mean that the usual suspects aren’t trying to downplay the importance of the decline in violence, the reports of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional cooperation, the stories about Iraqis moving back home, Osama bin Laden’s declaration of defeat for al Qaeda in Iraq (and/or Mesopotamia), the Mahdi Army’s cooperation with the U.S., the Anbar Awakening, and all the other successes and lucky breaks for the counterinsurgency being conducted under the leadership of General David Petraeus (aka the New Jesus).

None of this matters, of course. It’s only political benchmarks that should concern us—that’s all that has ever mattered, according to Ilan Goldenberg at DemocracyArsenal:

I have to agree with Kevin Drum. There really hasn’t been a major shift in tones. The Democrats and critics of the war have always made political progress the number one issue. The argument all summer over the benchmarks ultimately revolved around political progress. There has been no shift in tone. …

[D]espite the drop in violence, all the polls show that opposition to the war is at an all time high at almost 70%.

A commenter responds:

Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics have a paper trail to support the idea that they have always thought the core issue was political progress in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics also know that for the American public the core issue is the level of American casualties, as well as the overall level of violence, in Iraq. If American casualties are down and stay down, and the overall level of violence is down and stays down, the intensity of public feeling about the war should be expected to decline, even if large majorities continue to feel the war was a bad idea. [e.a.]

This sounds right to me. The public responds to what it sees or hears on the news. Public feeling about the war will start to decline also in response to the drop in “news” coverage of the war.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And Iraq is out of sight on the MSM because there aren’t any dramatic pictures to show—simple as that. No carnage and blood and gore and fire and ash and wailing Iraqis to put into heavy rotation 24/7. Fairly or not—even if Iraq is a huge mess for a long time, people will start to get the idea that things must be better—because it isn’t on their TV screens.

So the mewlings of the partisan Democrats who are now heavily invested in bad news emanating from Iraq—and, as the charming Nancy Pelosi might say, branded as “defeatocrats” to boot. And no one’s in the—will not find much of a market for their wares, I’m afraid.

For what it’s worth, I think Hillary is obviously the best positioned to take advantage of a turn of fortune for America’s adventure in Iraq.

————-

*** Nancy Pelosi to Matt Bai, quoted in the New York Times Magazine:

”We branded them with privatization, and they can’t sell that brand anywhere,” Pelosi bragged when I spoke with her in May.

Ezra Klein’s latest attempt to lay blame for the war in Iraq won’t wash:

Lots of people, ranging from Paul Wolfowitz to Paul Wellstone, believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and a far-from-completion nuclear program. The difference came in how you imagined the war would go, how difficult, and bloody, and expensive, and long, it would be. You could convince the American people, particularly after our illusory win in Afghanistan, that a short victory would be good all around. But no one would have signed up for this mess. And that’s where we needed our analysts to interject a dose of reality, a grounded take on how hard this would be, not a heap best-case, wishful thinking. And they failed us.

It pains me to have to remind the young Mr. Klein that people are responsible for their own “doses of reality.” If they fail to inform themselves—especially in a country where we can find things out for ourselves, where we have all the information available to us at the click of a mouse—it isn’t the fault of the many marketers (from every walk of life, not just politics) who are endlessly trying to sell us stuff, including ideas and images.

Don’t blame others for the fantasies that you believe in.

And while you’re at it, try to