Hedging by the gray lady

Ralph Peters:

SOMETIMES where a thing is said is bigger news than what was said. That happened on Monday, when The New York Times ran a guest op-ed detailing the progress in Iraq.

Long before the fall of Baghdad, The New York Times was as dogmatically pessimistic about the Bush administration's efforts as it was gushingly supportive of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It even promoted the least-qualified op-ed writer in North America as its point man for its attacks on our military: Frank Rich, whose experience was with ballet slippers, not combat boots.

Rich must feel like a dying swan just now.

What did the column in Monday's Times say? Exactly what readers of this paper have been hearing for months: Gen. Dave Petraeus has made a remarkable difference; al Qaeda's in trouble in Iraq; the performance of the Iraqi military is improving, and security gains are making a significant difference in the daily lives of Iraqis.

The column's authors had just returned from Iraq, where they traveled widely. Michael O'Hanlon of The Brookings Institution and Ken Pollack of Brookings' Saban Center aren't typical Washington think-tank drones parroting party lines. They're men of great integrity and veteran analysts. In the past, Pollack was sharply critical of the Rumsfeld-era mess in Iraq, while O'Hanlon wrote widely about policy shortcomings.

Their bottom-line message to America? Don't quit yet: The surge has shown sufficient success to merit its continuation into 2008.

The authors noted Iraq's enduring problems, not least sectarianism in the police establishment. But both men admitted that they had been surprised by the pace of progress. They described strolling the streets of Ramadi without body armor, where just months ago our Marines were fighting block by block.

The Times deserves credit for running the column, which contradicts the paper's editorial line of the past five years. Cynically, one might suspect the Gray Lady of hedging her bets as the turnaround in Iraq becomes impossible to dismiss (by anyone except the blustering Rich, who might usefully spend a few weeks in Iraq himself).

But the important thing is that the Times took one small step backward toward the days when its claim to be "the newspaper of record" didn't seem downright preposterous. The editors probably argued over the O'Hanlon/Pollack piece (which can still be read at realclearpolitics.com), but, in the end, they did the right thing and published it.

This matters. Because left-wing America-haters may disparage The Post and every other paper in the country, but they cling to the Times more avidly than Linus clutches his security blanket.

Even more important, the fact that the Times accepted the new reality in Iraq - at least to the extent of running a single op-ed about it - makes it more probable that the "last to know" and the "don't want to know" anti-war hucksters on Capitol Hill might start to feel the shift in the wind's direction.

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The sea change is in the feeling of inevitability that the anti war pukes have been pushing. With a dose of reality that was in no small part also pushed by the NY Times reporters in Iraq the op-ed helped to change the debate. Many of the Democrats are still left debating with discredited talking points. How much longer they can pretend that the situation has not improved is another question, but it can be measured in weeks at the most.