Category: Iraq

The Battle For Basra

The Iraqi Army is engaged in a major action against Shi’ite militias in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as radical “cleric” Moqtada al-Sadr is calling for “civil disobedience” against the Iraqi government:

The clashes came as Sadr’s movement mounted a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in many parts of eastern and central Baghdad, demanding the release of Sadr’s followers from detention centers and an end to Iraqi government raids. Sadrist leaders ordered stores to be shut down and taxi and bus drivers to stop operating. Television footage Tuesday showed neighborhoods turned into virtual ghost towns, their usually busy streets all but empty.

In a statement, Sadr called upon Iraqis to stage sit-ins and threatened a nationwide “civil revolt” if U.S. and Iraqi forces continue attacking and arresting his followers.

The actions were the latest sign that the ceasefire imposed by Sadr on his Mahdi Army militia is under strain.

Al-Sadr is worried: he renewed his “cease fire” recently, but now the radicals are losing confidence in his leadership. Over the period of the cease fire, several splinter groups decided to ignore his orders and launched attacks against the Iraqis and the coalition. Now it appears that al-Sadr is trying to placate those who want more action. There’s a huge risk in that: al-Sadr risks losing popular support by undermining the security gains of the last year and risks the dismantling of his organization at the hands of the Iraqi Police and Army.

That’s precisely what needs to happen. Moqtada al-Sadr has been a thorn in the side of Iraqi peace for far too long. Having the Iraqi government take him down, rather than the coalition, is the best option in terms of minimizing the fallout. Al-Sadr’s actions have indicated that he wants to be a terrorist rather than a politician, and he should be treated accordingly.

If Moqtada al-Sadr were such a great leader beloved by the Iraqis, he wouldn’t need to be hiding in Iran. The fact that al-Sadr seems unwilling or unable to show his face in Iraq is itself suggestive of his lack of power. His rise to power was based on the threat of Sunni militants—with al-Qaeda in Iraq being rolled back more and more each day, there’s little need for his “services.”

With luck, this will be the ignominious end of Moqtada al-Sadr—a marginalized figure being groomed for Iran for a position he’ll never be able to take. His Mahdi Army crushed, his followers disenchanted, his movement disbanded, al-Sadr will be unable to threaten Iraq’s peace and stability again. It is important that the young Iraqi state crush this rebellion—as important as George Washington putting down the Whiskey Rebellion was in our early history. The state must have the monopoly of violence to legitimize itself, and al-Sadr’s attempt at rebellion will ensure that the Iraqi government establishes quite clearly that it will defend itself from attack by undemocratic forces.

Spinning The Iraq/Al-Qaeda Links

The major news networks are running a story that claims that the Pentagon has released a study that says that Iraq and al-Qaeda were not linked before the fall of the Hussein regime. As Andrew McCarthy finds, the report actually says the direct opposite of what the media claims it says. For example, he notes the abstract to the report:

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a “de facto” link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime. (Emphasis mine.)

So, you have the mainstream media saying that the Pentagon’s report says that there was absolutely no link, yet the abstract to the report quite explicitly saying that there is a link.

We’ve known for some time that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden didn’t call each other every day, and they certainly weren’t each other’s BFF, to borrow a phrase. However, what the Pentagon report says is exactly what the argument has been all along: the Iraqi regime did have ties to terrorists, and those terrorists included members of al-Qaeda. They were willing to work together despite their differences, and it was more than plausible that had Saddam Hussein broken free of the sanctions he very well could have passed the results of a renewed WMD program to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and still maintain plausible deniability.

The media is spinning this report, and they’re not being even the least bit subtle about it. They’re hoping that people don’t bother reading it, don’t bother understanding it, and don’t question their narrative. If ever there was an example of agenda-based and shamelessly partisan journalism, this would be it.

In the old days, the media narrative would go unquestioned, but in a era of citizen journalism it’s a lot harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes—and apparently the media hasn’t learned that lesson quite yet.

Doing What They Do Best

David Weigel notes how the anti-war left is “moving on” after failing to “stop the war”:

If you’d said in January 2007 that Congress would fully fund the Iraq War, that there would be no timelines, and that a pro-war group fronted by Ari Fleischer would humiliate MoveOn… well, you’d be smarter than me.

It’s interesting to see that the surrender caucus has basically surrendered themselves. All the talk about how they were going to “end the war” ended up hitting the brick wall of reality. The Democrats didn’t have the votes, and the idea that there was a massive groundswell of opposition to the war never materialized. The reason behind that is rather simple: this war doesn’t effect most of us. This is not Vietnam. There’s no draft, the people fighting in Iraq are people who signed up to be in the military, not conscripts. Iraq is a theoretical issue for 90% of this country. They may not like the war, but it’s not something that directly effects them.

The other problem is that the anti-war left overplayed its hand. They immediately pronounced the surge to be a failure: which left them looking like idiots when the surge actually worked. To use a poker metaphor, the Democrats went all in thinking that they had a good hand—but when the flop actually came down, they ended up losing. Now the Democrats are in the unnecessary position of having to backtrack on their own rhetoric. It just proves the point that many of us have been making for years now: the Democratic Party is invested in failure in Iraq, and victory in Iraq is a loss for them. At some level, that comes down as unseemly, even for those who oppose the war.

I don’t think Iraq will be a major political issue. Al-Qaeda is unable to mount a convincing counteroffensive. Each day they wait they lose more, so if they had the capability of punching back it seems likely they’d have done it by now. Unless there’s a mass-casualty event, the American people have accepted Iraq as part of life. It doesn’t effect them, and it doesn’t fire people up who aren’t already anti-war.

That won’t stop the Democrats from using Iraq as a campaign issue, and Democrats respond strongly to it. However, it’s not the major issue that it was in 2004 and 2006 (and it wasn’t even the key issue in 2006). The Democrats bought into their own rhetoric: they assumed they won because of a groundswell of opposition to the war rather than the lack of leadership among the Republicans. They overplayed their hand, and now they’ve been forced to surrendering on surrender.

Invested In Failure

The Washington Post has a pointed op-ed asking why the Democrats cannot acknowledge that the “surge” actually worked:

A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush — political accords among Iraq’s competing factions — has not been reached. (That happens to be our reaction to a campaign that we greeted with skepticism a year ago.) It also would involve a willingness by the candidates to reconsider their long-standing plans to carry out a rapid withdrawal of remaining U.S. forces in Iraq as soon as they become president — a step that would almost certainly reverse the progress that has been made.

What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence.

It’s simple: the Democrats cannot countenance the idea that Iraq is not failing, and that the surge worked. Just one year ago they were all saying that there was no end to the violence in Iraq. Now they have to face up to the fact that nearly every single dire prediction they made was false. None of them have the intellectual courage to admit that they were wrong. To do so would irretrievably endanger support from the vociferously anti-war base of the Democratic Party today.

As typical, political rhetoric and political reality are on opposite ends. The surge worked because it involved a significant change of tactics, using the successful model of Tal Afar on a national scale. The goal of the surge was never to make Iraq into another Switzerland. It’s hypocritical of the Democrats to simultaneously argue that it’s impossible to create democratic reforms through military force, then argue that the only way that the surge can be successful is to do exactly that. The purpose of the surge was always singular: to end Iraq’s spiral into anarchy and create the conditions upon which democratic development can occur. It’s up to the Iraqi people to take the next steps, and it will take some time before that happens. In the meantime, the level of violence has dropped precipitously and the qualitative measures of life in Iraq are becoming better than they were before the war—for example, electricity production is above where it was when Saddam was in power.

The Democrats don’t want to acknowledge these facts because they’re still wedded to a political narrative of defeat. For all their talk about being “agents of change” the Democrats apparently can’t drift too far from their political script on Iraq even when it makes them look desperately out of touch.

A Monkey Wrench In Pelosi’s Plans?

Rep. John Murtha, one of the most vociferous opponents of the Iraq War is now saying that the surge is working:

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), one of the leading anti-war voices in the House Democratic Caucus, is back from a trip to Iraq and he now says the “surge is working.” This could be a huge problem for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders, who are blocking approval of the full $200 billion being sought by President Bush for combat operations in Iraq in 2008.

Murtha’s latest comments are also a stark reversal from what he said earlier in the year. The Pennsylvania Democrat, who chairs the powerful Defense subcommittee on the House Appropriations Committee, has previously stated that the surge “is not working” and the United States faced a military disaster in Iraq.

Murtha told CNN on July 12, following a Bush speech, that the president’s views on the success of [the] surge in Iraq were “delusional.”

Apparently it’s no longer as “delusional” as it once was. The reality on the ground in Iraq has now reached a point where it’s no longer deniable. This puts the Democrats in a bind: they’ve argued all year that the “surge” was doomed to failure, that Iraq was going to collapse into civil war, and that the only thing we could do was go home. Now, all those predictions have proven to be wrong—the “surge” did work, violence is down, and Iraqi refugees are returning to home.

Of course, the narrative has already changed that the “real” goal of the surge was to get the Iraqi government to make political concessions rather than simply laying the groundwork for those concessions to be possible. However, that’s a transparent attempt to try and ignore the very real progress that’s been made: and the more obvious that progress becomes, the harder it is to change the subject—especially when the word “quagmire” was used so capriciously.

It will be interesting to see what Rep. Pelosi’s reaction will be as more members of the House start backing away from the defeat-at-any-price coalition, it’s going to be harder and harder to play political games over war funding. When even John “Redeploy to Okinawa” Murtha is forced to admit that the military goals of the surge are being met, it’s clear that the line that the surge was a failure and it’s “delusional” to think that it could work just won’t fly anymore.

Something To Be Thankful For… Unless You’re A Defeatist Democrat…

Don Surber lays it on the line: we’re winning in Iraq, and the Democrats are stuck in the past:

The New York Times devoted a huge hunk of its Page One on Tuesday to the good news of the return to more normal times in Iraq. The story was illustrated with a photo of a wedding scene on the streets of Baghdad.

Violence has been cut in half. And while the nation is far from the tranquil democracy that many of us hoped for in April 2003, it also is a far cry from the chaotic mess it was just six months ago.

We are winning in Iraq.

Will someone please inform the Democrats?

He’s right: the signs are unmistakable. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been routed. Without the support of Iraq’s Sunni population, they have no hiding place. There’s nowhere for them to run in Iraq, and they can’t pull the same trick they did before and retreat back into the periphery around the major cities. The “Awakening” movements are everywhere and the Iraqis are no longer willing to tolerate terrorist oppressors in their midst.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq can still cause problems, but in a real tactical sense, they’ve been defeated.

The Shi’ite death squads such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army are similarly skating on thin ice. Moqtada al-Sadr is a tool of Iran, funded and armed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards forces. Yet now al-Sadr’s organization is being rolled up—at least those whose radicalism doesn’t allow them to follow his “cease fire.” Those are the ones most likely to cause problems. Getting rid of them diminishes the ability for al-Sadr to cause problems in the future. Al-Sadr is a thug, but even he has realized that attacking the Iraqi government has gotten him nowhere. His cease fire order is a political calculation—it’s no longer expedient for him to play the part of the revolutionary leader. That alone should say something about the conditions in Iraq.

So why don’t the Democrats get it? Why are they still trying to play politics over the war? If even The New York Times can see that things are getting better, why can’t they find a change in strategy?

The simple answer is that’s all they have.

The Democratic Congress has failed to achieve any significant legislative achievements. The most they’ve gotten is a minor increase in the minimum wage that has little effect, and most of the effect it will have will be negative. They’re playing to their base as a defensive posture: they think that by “ending the war” people will ignore their inability to get anything done.

That kind of political posturing doesn’t mean anything. The Democrats have become so invested in a narrative of failure that they can’t even perceive of anything different. They’re absolutely fixated on this one issue.

The more the disparity grows between the reality of Iraq and the Democrat’s defeatist rhetoric, the more desperate and out-of-touch the Democrats look. Right now, all the juvenile political games the Democrats are playing in Congress only makes them look even less like leaders and more like squabbling children. Attaching more conditions to war funding is a maneuver designed for nothing more than partisan politics. It hurts our troops, and if the Democrats keep playing these games they’ll only hurt the local economies around military bases when the Defense Department has to start firing support staff to keep in operation. If that happens, the Democrats will be in real political trouble.

The Democrats have been painting themselves in a corner for years now. That strategy has worked when Iraq has been on a downslide, but now that things are getting better, they have nowhere to go. They’re pretending like the situation in Iraq is the same as it was in 2006 because that’s when their strategy was successful. Yet the circumstances have changed, and the Democrats have not.

The Democrats are invested in a narrative, and their narrative is increasingly disconnected from the facts. (Not that it ever was.) Sooner or later, the American people are going to start to question why the Democrats seem to be so invested in American defeat in Iraq, especially when the situation seems to be stabilized. If the Democrats were smart they’d start changing their narrative to say that they were the ones who pushed Bush into conceding that the strategy of 2003–2006 had failed. Indeed, that’s precisely what Sen. John McCain is already doing. Yet to do that would be to alienate the hardcore antiwar constituency that has a chokehold on the Democratic Party.

The situation is getting better in Iraq, but the narrative in Washington remains the same. As our troops and their Iraqi allies rack up more and more victories against terrorism in Iraq, the Democrats keep wanting to pull the rug out from under them. It’s one thing to advocate for surrender in a war that’s going badly—it’s entirely another to do the same in a war that’s being won. The fact that the Democrats can’t seem to understand that demonstrates just how much the narrative has overwhelmed their common sense.

UPDATE: Michael Yon offers a note of caution. He’s right: even an enemy that’s been largely defeated can still cause plenty of trouble. All that it takes is a lucky strike in a crowded market with a car bomb for the old narrative to re-emerge. The story of counterinsurgency and democratization is often a story of two steps forward and one and a half steps back. Iraq has taken a giant step forward in recent months, but that doesn’t mean that they’re out of the woods quite yet.

Iraq Violence Falling

The New York Times acknowledges that violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously, now reaching the same level as before the attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarrah that kicked off massive internecine conflict in Iraq:

The data released Sunday cover attacks using car bombs, roadside bombs, mines, mortars, rockets, surface-to-air missiles and small arms. According to the statistics, roughly 575 attacks occurred last week.

That is substantially fewer than the more than 700 attacks that were recorded the week that Sunni militants set off a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq by blowing up a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006. And it represents a huge drop since June when attacks soared to nearly 1,600 one week.

American officials said other measures indicated that civilian deaths had dropped. Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a spokesman for the command, said civilian deaths had dropped by 60 percent since June.

Military analysts said a number of factors explained the drop. They say, for example, that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi insurgent group with foreign leadership, has been greatly weakened by American military attacks.

Thousands of new Sunni volunteers have made common cause with the Americans. About 72,000 such civilians have joined the effort, American officials said, and 45,000 each receive a $300 a month stipend from the Americans to help with the effort.

Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, has ordered his militiamen to stand down. American military officials also say that Iran appears to be abiding by a commitment to reduce the flow of roadside bombs and other weapons into Iraq. Beyond that, many Iraqis appear to be exhausted by the sectarian violence and eager for a modicum of stability.

In essence, our nearly year-long process of changing our counterinsurgency strategy is paying off. The “surge” wasn’t just about increasing troop numbers, but about a major change of strategy away from protecting our own forces and towards protecting Iraqi civilians. At the same time al-Qaeda in Iraq’s sheer barbarity was alienating the Iraqis, the US was changing strategy to work better with the Iraqi people. The confluence of those two events is key to understanding why violence is down. Iraq’s Sunni population had finally had enough, and we were there to support them in their grass-roots effort to destroy al-Qaeda.

The majority of the credit does need to go to the Iraqis. In order for Iraq to be secure, the Iraqis need to stand up and fight against terrorism. That is precisely what Iraqi Sunnis have been doing—and as the murder of Sheikh Abu Sattar al-Risha demonstrates, their bravery comes at a cost. Even the Iranians are realizing that the costs of their proxy war against the US are too great. They’ve stopped their shipments of weapons to terrorists in Iraq and they’ve put Moqtada al-Sadr back on his leash.

Of course, anything could change in Iraq, but the signs of progress have become unavoidable. Violence is down, al-Qaeda in Iraq is severely disrupted, and life is returning to normal in many parts of the country.

Those who have protested this war have now painted themselves into a rhetorical corner. By arguing that Iraq is an unwinnable morass and the biggest foreign policy blunder in US history, any sign of progress undercuts their argument. Yet despite all the negative hyperbole, the situation in Iraq is undoubtedly getting better, and all the resources spent by al-Qaeda in training and equipping fighters in Iraq has diminished their resources and left them with nothing. Instead of radicalizing Iraqi Sunnis, the last few months have seen Iraqi Sunnis soundly rejecting al-Qaeda and embracing a course of democratic peace.

There remains much left to be done, but should these trends continue, the drawdown of forces scheduled for the next few months shouldn’t leave the kind of security vacuum that caused problems in the past. The Iraqis have rejected terrorism and embraced a peace, albeit an uneasy one. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will always be a matter of two steps forward followed by one and a half steps back, but Iraq is democratizing, if in baby steps. Far from a disaster, the war in Iraq may end up being the turning point in which radical Islamic terrorist suffered its first major defeat in its own back yard.

Homecoming

Michael Yon has another wonderful dispatch from Iraq, following up on the story of how a group of local Iraqis are welcoming back Iraq’s Christian diaspora:

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

I constantly hear many people here in America and elsewhere keep saying that Iraq simply can’t be democratic. The line usually goes about how you can’t change 4,000 years of culture. That argument never sits right with me: is Iraqi “culture” synonymous with terrorism and oppression? Are Iraqis somehow unable to accept others? It always seemed a bit like the arguments used to justify racism in the Deep South: since part of Southern “culture” had been corrosive racism, how could we expect that to change?

The Iraqi people keep proving their critics wrong. They say that democracy can’t take in Iraqi culture: yet Iraq had a larger turnout in their election than most American elections that don’t involve death threats against voters. We keep hearing how Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites hate each other and can never get along: yet most Iraqi tribes and families were mixed Sunni and Shi’ite before al-Qaeda began their brutal campaign of divide and conquer. We keep hearing about how Iraq will inevitably become a fundamentalist Muslim state: yet here we have Iraqi Muslims in a Catholic Church asking their Christian friends to come back home—for they will protect them.

Pictures like the ones that Yon brings from Baghdad remind me of the why I’m proud to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. I am offended by those arguments precisely because I see them as being tinged with a subtle yet corrosive racism: the argument that Iraqis can’t be free and democratic because of “culture” diminishes the notion that human rights are universal and innate. The arguments that Iraqis can’t be free because they haven’t “earned” their democracy diminishes the unimaginable suffering and the incredible bravery of many Iraqis. Even though these arguments are usually made without the intention of being arrogant, they ultimately are arrogant: they suggest that somehow we in the West are better than the people of Iraq. That we’re evolved enough to support democracy and the Iraqis are not.

We live in a sheltered culture of comfort, and yet we have the audacity to criticize people who have faced 30 years of utter tyranny followed by 4 years of terrorism. If any of us were to walk in the shoes of a typical Iraqi, would we be willing to do what they have done? We can barely get off the couch on Election Day, no less face terrorists who threaten to kill anyone who votes. Would we be as brave? Is our commitment to our democracy as strong as theirs?

The Iraqis have suffered greatly, but ultimately they are building a better future for themselves. Far from being a backwards culture doomed to fundamentalism and sectarianism, the people of Iraq demonstrate, hidden from our view, that their belief in democracy and freedom may sometimes be greater than our own.

What If It Works?

The New Republic‘s The Stump political blog asks the question what the political consequences of a successful “surge” in Iraq will be. To be honest, I think we already know the answer.

The importance of Iraq to the 2008 elections is already fading as an issue. As the situation in Iraq slowly begins to improve, the amount of attention it gets from the media decreases. (Unless, of course, they can find some new “grim milestone” to report about.) The reality of the conflict in Iraq is that much of what we set out to do has been done, and now our job is to allow the Iraqis to make the best of their own situation. With the Awakening movements spreading across the country and al-Qaeda being run out, it’s looking less and less likely that Iraq will be a cesspool of terrorism. It may be a fragile democracy that takes years to get over its sectarian conflicts, but that’s to be expected. As I said before the war, in many ways the political development of Iraq will be easier than in Afghanistan, which has never had the sort of modern infrastructure and development that Iraq had.

The diminishing importance of Iraq actually benefits the Democrats. For one, even if we do achieve something close to victory in Iraq the media narrative will be that it was in spite of Bush rather than because it. (Even though it was Bush who stuck it through while the Democrats wanted to bug out.) We’ll see the Democrats return to their 2004 message of “we’ll do it smarter” which is a much more tenable position for them to be in than “let’s get the hell out of here.” Hillary Clinton’s votes to start the war will seem less consequential if it turns out well. Even more importantly, it lets the Democrats focus on domestic issues where they have greater strength.

I don’t believe Iraq will be the top issue in 2008. I’m not so sure it will be a top issue. If I had to prognosticate, I’d say the top issues will be corruption, immigration, entitlement reform and health care, not necessarily in that order. That’s the way that the political landscape appears to be shifting already, and those trends seem likely to continue.

What has happened in Iraq is that the fuel has been removed from the fire. The Sunnis realize that they’re in a battle they can’t win and now want a place at the table. Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have been forced to call a truce before they ended up once again being killed in the streets for making everyone’s lives miserable. Al-Qaeda has been battered from all sides and no longer can find safe harbor anywhere in Iraq. Now that the Sunnis have rejected them, they have nowhere to go. Even the Iranians seem to be backing down from their attempts to control Iraq.

We will almost certainly have some forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future, just as precaution and a training force for Iraq police and military. However, we won’t have 100,000+ soldiers there inevitably. Given the way in which the Iraqis themselves are finally taking increasing responsibility for their own country and the security situation is improve, the real conflict in Iraq will be in the halls of their Parliament and not in the streets.

Whatever the political consequences of that may be for us at home, it’s certainly good news for Iraq. After years of war, they finally have a real shot at normalcy, and that means more for the future of this world than who wins the next election in the US.

The New Narrative

The Mudville Gazette takes a look at the next Iraq War narrative that will be repeated ad nauseam by the press:

The narrative on Iraq – the one you see in the media, that is – is changing. Claims that “we’ve lost” and that American soldiers have been beaten by opponents who are righteous heroes or nine-foot tall and bullet proof are being quite subtly shifted to arguments that no potential victory (if even grudgingly acknowledged) could be worth the price. This argument may prove irresistible to those who’ve invested heavily in defeat.

It’s all the same: no matter what, the advocates for defeat in Iraq will find something that’s horribly wrong and some excuse to declare the entire endeavor an abject failure. The reasoning changes, but the argument remains the same.

The divide between the reality of Iraq and the narrative on Iraq is no longer a mere divide—it’s a gaping chasm. While the media once again finds despair in Iraq for the United States and the free Iraqi people, the real despair comes from Osama bin Laden.

This month, bin Laden made an unprecedented call to try to unite his faltering jihad in Iraq. There appears to be a very open sense of desperation from the leadership of al-Qaeda as the Iraqi people turn against their radicalism. The reason why this war has been worth it is because four years in, we’ve managed to defeat al-Qaeda not only militarily, but also ideologically. The people of Iraq are turning their backs on al-Qaeda, and in some cases even openly fighting them off.

Al-Qaeda has invested nearly everything it has in fighting in Iraq. They keep losing. They lost al-Zarqawi to US bombs. They’ve lost thousands of trained fighters to American attacks. Most crucially for them, they’ve also lost the Iraqi people, and if that spreads across the Middle East, al-Qaeda is as good as dead. They’ll be yet another failed movement that sputtered out and died when their radical propaganda couldn’t match their meager results. The attacks of September 11 greatly enhanced the stature of al-Qaeda. 6 years later, what have they been able to do? They are on the run, battered by US attacks, and they’ve failed to defend Afghanistan and win over Iraq.

The new narrative is no more accurate than the old. Al-Qaeda is being defeated in Iraq, while the media keeps to their script and ignores it all. The American people may not be getting the real story from Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that what’s going on there isn’t any less important. The costs of this war have been terrible, but the costs of another attack by al-Qaeda or a more protracted “cold” war between the US and Islamic extremists would have been far greater.