Jay Reding.com

Even as terrorists try to their best to sow fear, the signs of a major turnaround in Iraq continue as the inertia in the conflict now favors stability rather than violence.

Al-Anbar Province, once the center of violence in Iraq and a pipeline for terrorists, guns, and money is now a place of relative tranquility. The reason is simple: US resolve helped empower Iraqis to fight terrorism:

The U.S. military assault on Fallujah in 2004 yielded a significant U.S. victory both in moral and tactical terms, David Bellavia, a former staff sergeant with the U.S. Army who served with the First Infantry Division for six years, said in an interview.

“I call it my generation’s Normandy because it identified for the enemy what the American fighting man was all about,” he said. “They completely underestimated us and had this idea that because we couldn’t use our technology, we wouldn’t have intestinal fortitude to see the battle through, but this is what ultimately delivered us.”

In 2005, Bellavia received the Conspicuous Service Cross, the highest award for military valor in New York state. He is also the author of “House to House,” which chronicles the Battle of Fallujah in graphic detail.

The Rumsfeld strategy, while based on a sound premise, was ultimately based on the wrong premise. The worry was that more troops would mean more casualties, which emphasized the worries of American politicians rather than what really mattered—the security of Iraqi civilians. Even during the darkest days of the war, brave and resourceful military commanders like Col. H.R. McMaster were developing the tactics to fight and win in Iraq. In Fallujah, we demonstrated that we would not back down. That lesson was brought home time and time again, until finally the Iraqis started joining our side. Once that began to happen in a significant fashion, al-Qaeda was damned.

This ABC News report puts the usual spin on the good news: sure, violence is down, but will it last. What the media, Sen. Obama, and the rest of the antiwar partisans fail to understand is that the reduction in violence is the direct result of our fortitude on Iraq. For all of the President’s legion of faults, especially in the conduct of this war, his stubbornness may have saved Iraq from a humanitarian nightmare that would make Darfur look like nothing. His stubbornness and our military’s skill, combined with the bravery of the Iraqi people have paid off with a great peace dividend.

This peace will last so long as national reconciliation is in the interest of all the parties. The Sunnis are outnumbered. They tried violent resistance and were nearly ethnically cleansed. The Shi’ites also know that violence does not help them. They have political leverage, and because of that they have the most to lose if Iraq flies apart. They may have the numeric superiority, but if they start a civil war, the Sunnis will end up back in bed with al-Qaeda, and even if the Shi’ites win, it will be at a great cost, and would cause Iraq to fall into the hands of the Iranians. Iraqi and Iranians share a common religion, but nothing else.

Iraq can be peaceful, not because of some noble ambition, but because of enlightened self interest—and that is the most powerful force in the universe.

Yet all this could be undone by a public more interested in bread and circuses than world peace. The Democratic Party, by playing to the basest isolationist and xenophobic interests, is threatening the progress that has been made. A premature withdrawal from Iraq would undermine all this progress. If the US leaves, the Iraqis cannot yet keep the peace. A US presence is a necessity to provide the Iraqis with the security needed for progress. The argument that the US presence somehow undermines Iraq’s progress is ridiculous on its face—Iraq has made great political progress, and that progress is only possible because the Iraqis have security. If the Iraqi people cannot be secure in their homes, how can they possibly be expected to trust each other? I, for one, would love to see Sen. Obama spin his way out of that question.

Contrary to the ignorant and arrogant arguments that Iraqis are not pulling their weight, they are making great strides towards restoring the greatness of the nation of Iraq. Day by day, the Iraqis that work towards the betterment of their nation and fight against terror bring Iraq closer to the days when Baghdad can once again be a center of learning and commerce and a great world city.

We in America must never belittle their sacrifice. In a spirit of solidarity, we must continue to support our Iraqi allies in their fight against terror and oppression. Instead of giving them up, we should continue to support their struggles—after all, we were once a struggling young power as well.

It is fair to ask what we are fighting for. What we are fighting for in Iraq is this: that one day a joint US-Iraqi biotechnology venture can discover a cure for cancer, AIDS, or another terrible affliction. That some day, in a place like Darfur, US and Iraqi peacekeepers can work alongside each other again to restore another war-shattered country. That some day, Iraq will become a brother nation to us, an ally as great as those we liberated 60 years ago.

That dream is within the grasp of both the people of the United States and Iraq—but only if we do not let our short-term politics interfere.

The success of the “surge” in Iraq has apparently become so blatant that even the Obama-infatuated Andrew Sullivan can’t help but see it:

The WaPo reflects what I’ve been trying to understand better: the surprising success (after a rocky start) of the Iraqi Army in Basra, the neutralization of the worst parts of the Sadr forces in Sadr City, increasing success in Mosul, and four-year lows in sectarian violence. The caveats are still there and should never be discounted: Sadr’s militias are still strong in the shadows, sectarian tensions can still flare up, national reconciliation (with a few recent bright spots) remains elusive, Iran is meddlesome, etc. But that the Maliki government is stronger now than anyone anticipated a few months ago seems beyond doubt.

Sullivan counsel Obama not to be unduly pessimistic about Iraq. However, Obama and the other Democrats are invested too heavily in a narrative of defeat to accept anything else. The radical antiwar faction of the Democratic Party has taken the reigns of the party, leaving little room for any heterodox opinions. To speak for the war is to invite the wrath of MoveOn and the rest of the new leftist machine in America.

Even though the progress on the ground speaks for itself, the Democrats do not have the ears to hear it.

Peggy Noonan has, perhaps surprisingly, some positive things to say about former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new “tell-all” book. As much as it would be valuable to have more inside looks at what happened in the run-up to the war in Iraq, McClellan’s book is tainted right from the start.

The Wall Street Journal connects the dots and finds that McClellan’s book was funded and published by the usual radical left-wing groups. That alone isn’t fatal, but the way in which this book is being fawned over reeks of an organized media strategy—the sort of thing which suggest that the real purpose of this book is not to tell the truth, but to advance an agenda. Even Noonan admits that the book is vapid and makes the same unsubstantiated allegations that we have all heard before.

Compare that reaction to the refusal of the mainstream media to even acknowledge Douglas Feith’s book on the start of the war in Iraq. Feith was a central player in that conflict, where McClellan was not. Feith has backed up his memories with actual documentation, while McClellan’s book has not.

The reason for the disparate treatment is obvious: McClellan is telling the media exactly what they want to hear; Feith’s narratives go against the media’s prejudices on Iraq.

It would be valuable to get to the truth about what really went on during the months before the invasion of Iraq, but expecting the truth from an author who is being swept up in such a self-serving media frenzy is too much to ask.

Instapundit has a lengthy note from a Colonel in Baghdad on the recent fighting in Basra. He observes that the driving force in that conflict was not Moqtada al-Sadr, but the lack of services being provided by the Iraqi Government. Indeed, that highlights a bigger issue: over the long term, the biggest problem in Iraq isn’t terrorism. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been largely crushed. Moqtada al-Sadr was forced to cry uncle and is viewed by all as an Iranian stooge. While there are still acts of violence in Iraq, they’re less and less the sort of organized attacks that we’ve seen over the course of the war.

The real issue is going to be corruption. The biggest roadblock to democratization is corruption, and it’s endemic in Iraq. The Iraqis have a source of revenue in oil, and it’s enough to sustain their development. The problem is without a system of accountability and transparency, that money won’t go to where it’s needed.

Over time, we’re going to need a new “surge”—but one that focuses on working with the Iraqi government to stop corruption. We’re in a unique position to help, and working alongside the Iraqis we need to develop systems that help make sure money goes to where it is truly needed and those that steal from the Iraqi treasury are brought to justice.

Most NGOs focus on issues other than helping improve the rule of law in foreign nations—and it seems counterintuitive to think that accountants rather than aid workers can truly help developing nations. Yet, if a nation is to transition successfully from autocracy to democracy, fiscal accountability is absolutely crucial. Many democratizing states fail to democratize because the government does not act with accountability to the people, which causes the people to lose faith in government.

The US needs to work with NGOs like Transparency International and the Iraqi government to create a more democratic and accountable political and financial system for the Iraqi people. We have made great strides in terms of fighting terrorism and providing security—yet that alone won’t be enough to make Iraq a strong and functional nation. The future of Iraq hinges on the ability of the government to provide critical services while remaining accountable to the people. If it cannot do this, then the Iraqi people will be forced to turn to militia leaders for help, and Iraqi society will fragment. This does not have to come to pass, but in order to prevent it we have to start looking beyond basic security and towards governmental reform.

NOTE: This is a piece that was originally published a few days ago, but was lost to a server move.

Ross Douthat has a great piece in The Atlantic on how Hollywood is returning to the themes of the 1970s due in large part to the Iraq War:

Nothing in this commentary, however, bears much resemblance to the way American popular culture actually has evolved since 9/11. The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Tears of the Sun proved to be an outlier; more typical of our cultural moment are the movies that its director and star turned out early last year. In Fuqua’s Shooter, a redneck sniper goes up against a conspiracy that’s headed by a villainous right-wing Montana senator (who happens to be a Dick Cheney look-alike) and aimed at covering up an oil company’s human-rights abuses. In Robert Rodriguez’s B-movie homage, Planet Terror, Willis plays another military man, but this time the plot, such as it is, turns on a zombie-creating nerve agent that may have been tested on Willis and his soldiers, the movie hints, as punishment for their having killed Osama bin Laden when the government wanted him kept alive and at large.

Such self-conscious nods to contemporary controversies should be taken, in part, as proof that our popular culture is more impervious to real-world tragedy than most critics would care to admit. The machine that churns out Hollywood blockbusters grinds on remorselessly, and nothing so minor as a terrorist attack is going to keep the next Pirates of the Caribbean from its date with box-office destiny.

But it wasn’t just the reassertion of America’s usual frivolity that caused the 9/11 moment to be stillborn; it was the swiftness with which the Iraq War replaced the fall of the Twin Towers as this decade’s cultural touchstone. It’s Halliburton, Abu Ghraib, and the missing WMDs that have summoned up a cultural moment in which bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek punch line for a zombie movie and the film industry’s typical take on geopolitics traces all the world’s evils to the machinations of a White Male enemy at home.

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.

What’s interesting is how all of Hollywood’s attempts to portray the war in Iraq have failed. Redacted was an absolute bomb. Ditto Lions for Lambs. Same for In the Valley of Elah. No doubt Stop Loss, the latest anti-war polemic will do no better. Hollywood is a town where the dollar is king, yet the studios keep churning out the same stories and keep getting the same results.

There’s no shortage of amazing stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan—including those that could offer a balance perspective on the horrors of war. Yet Hollywood keeps spitting out predictable, preachy anti-war films in which the military are either sadists or treated as pawns. The idea of actually telling a story without constantly having to insert a political message that has all the subtlety and nuance of a kick to the testicles seems totally alien to Hollywood these days. It’s as though the directors want to take a rhetorical bullhorn and say LOOK! I’M BEING TOTALLY RELEVANT NOW! CAN’T YOU FEEL THE OUTRAGE! Meanwhile, everyone’s gone home and turned on The Office.

What Hollywood doesn’t get is that it’s not that audiences are too stupid to see the greatness of their work, it’s that Hollywood is too sanctimonious to realize that their work isn’t great at all. It’s a sad commentary on Hollywood today that one of the most relevant shows in terms of exploring this war is Battlestar Galactica in which the terrorists are inexplicably attractive, yet evil robot clones. In Galactica the military and the government are not a bunch of moustache-twirling villains, but are portrayed as three-dimensional characters dealing with an impossible situation. (It helps that the showrunning, Ronald D. Moore, actually served in the military and offers a great deal of authenticity.) Hollywood can be relevant, at least in metaphorical form.

The reason why most of the Iraq War movies have failed is that they constantly try to be “message” movies. War is bad. Halliburton is bad. Bush is bad. Cheney is really, really bad. If the American people wanted to hear stories about how incompetent our government is, we’d watch the news. Hollywood keeps coming back to the same old clichés—the sadistic soldier, the heartless military bureaucracy, the “rogue agent.” All of those clichés have been used up more than Britney Spears, and don’t look any better.

The War Movie That Nobody’s Making

If anyone wants to make a truly great war movie, here’s what they need to do. Don’t try to give us a “message.” Don’t try to push an agenda. Just tell a story. You know, the thing that Hollywood is supposed to do well? You don’t have to create some scathing indictment of war—if you just show war it indicts itself. Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest war movies ever made because it never flinches from showing the horrors of war. It’s not a “pro-war” movie, nor is it an “anti-war” movie. It’s just a movie about war. You don’t need to create the character of Col. Evil McHitler who secretly sells the organs of Iraqi children to Halliburton to be used to grease oil drills to expose the horrors of war. War is itself horrible, and by creating all these silly little contrivances Hollywood doesn’t add to their message, they detract from it.

The best films coming out of the Iraq War are documentaries. Gunner Palace is one of the best movies about this war, not because the filmmakers went in to push an agenda, but because they just turned the cameras on and let things happen. The real-life soldiers in Gunner Palace are more fascinating than the cardboard-cutouts in movies like Jarhead. The situations they face don’t require elaborate and silly conspiracy theories. Instead, they’re in the middle of an unfamiliar country filled with unfamiliar people. The lines between friend and foe are frequently blurred. There’s an amazing effective scene in Gunner Palace in which the unit arrests the Iraqi man that had been working with them as a translator for months. They arrest him for working with the same insurgents that were trying to kill them. Nothing in any Hollywood war film in the last few years is as powerful as the sense of betrayal and confusion that those real-world soldiers displayed. There are thousands of stories like that happening in Iraq—yet instead of letting those stories be told, Hollywood just generates more crude propaganda.

Douthat’s lengthy piece goes much deeper into the return of the culture of the 1970s in Hollywood, including how it’s effected more than just war movies. Still, we don’t need films that hearken back to the 70s any more than we need a return to avacado-green appliances and orange shag carpet. What we need are movies that are relevant to today. The reason why Hollywood’s effort to make war movies have led to box office death is that they keep missing the real stories. In trying to damn war in general and this war in particular they keep undermining themselves by replacing the complex horrors of war with crude stereotypes. It’s like trying to say that Nightmare on Elm Street is a deep exploration of Sigmund Freud.

Just because the war in Iraq is unpopular doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring through film—and exploring well. Hollywood’s attempts at “relevance” are ham-handed and self-defeating. Hollywood is supposed to be good at telling stories. Yet they are nowhere near as good as the men and women who have served in Iraq in understanding what this war is really about. For all Hollywood’s obsession with their own “bravery” none are so bold as to let the truly brave tell their own stories. Hollywood isn’t brave enough to create a movie told from the Iraqi perspective that depicts the systematic brutalization of the Hussein regime followed by the uncertainty and chaos. For all Hollywood’s bravery, few in Hollywood are so brave as to make a movie in which al-Qaeda is the enemies. It’s safe to indict your own government. We live in a free society. A film that indicts al-Qaeda could get you killed. So much for bravery. Instead, Hollywood gives us a steady diet of polemics that are designed to make sure we all think the right way about this war. Instead, they should simply show the reality and let us decide for ourselves.

There are a million stories coming from Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time that Hollywood told their stories, not the ones that our insulated Hollywood elites think will get them pats on the back from their own ilk. This war is becoming a “lost war,” and that does no service to the men and women who put their lives on the line for a conflict few of us can even begin to understand.