German media spots US success in Iraq

Jules Crittenden:

Written by a German in a brutally honest, harsh-lit multi-part article in Der Spiegel. The dirty secret the world doesn’t want to know. America, in heavy sacrifice of blood and treasure, is doing something right in Iraq. Quick version follows below. Scroll past that for thoughts on what this says about the American media’s shameful failure in Iraq:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq — not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers — are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn’t hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious “Sunni Triangle,” is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

… The world has become deaf to the word “peace” — at least when conversations turn to Iraq. It is as if the world were blind to the possibility that the situation in this country straddling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers could be anything different from the constant stream of increasingly devastating films of the latest car bombings. For most people, Iraq has become nothing but a series of attacks, a collection of images of bombings and victims, a tale of failure, a book about historical guilt and a symbol of the moral decline of the United States of America.

But the real story in Iraq cannot be summed up in short news clips and quick, shaky television images. Body counts and names of the dead tell only part of the story of Iraq today. Research for this story took me on a three-week journey throughout the country, my fourth trip to Iraq in as many years. Under the protection of the US military, it led us to the northern city of Mosul and its suburbs, to Ramadi and to Baghdad. The military did not choose our destinations, SPIEGEL did. Apart from a few technical and strategic details, nothing was censored.

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There is no doubt that the greatest enemies of success in Iraq are in Tehran and Damascus. Many of the jihadists enter the country through Syria, and Iran supports the terrorists with weapons and money. During their operations, US troops often find brand-new mines and grenades produced in Iranian weapons factories, sometime still in their original packaging. Fighters from the Iranian Al-Quds Brigades are active on Iraqi soil, and there are terrorist training camps across the border in Iran. “Iran,” says Crocker, “wants to defeat the West on more than one front, and it also wants to make sure that Iraq will never pose a threat to it again.”

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There is much more, but probably the biggest enemies of success in Iraq or not even in Tehran or Damascus. They are the Democrats in Washington who are the last best hope of al Qaeda in Iraq and the ambitions of those in Tehran and Damascus. Anyone who does not recognize that has not been paying attention to US politics over the last few months and the desperation for defeat by the leaders of the Democrat party who have scheduled vote after vote on retreat and defeat in Iraq. Some like Harry Reid have even pronounced the war lost and the surge unsuccessful. Now as they try to crawl back from that position we should remind the American people who the faint hearted were who did not have confidence in our troops and our strategy.