The Sunni rejection of al Qaeda

Max Boot:

...

A sign of how much things have changed: In July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was pressing for a "date certain" for troop withdrawal; he derided those who wanted to pass a nonbinding drawdown resolution "that has no teeth in it" just so "you can circle and sing 'Kumbaya.' " Today, he's trying to reach accommodation with Republicans on just such a "Kumbaya" bill.

It's obvious what accounts for the more cooperative mood. Notwithstanding all the political hype and hyperbole, events on the ground do matter, and there is no denying that events in Iraq have been moving in the right direction since the surge started. Not even the Democrats deny it. Sens. Jack Reed, Hillary Clinton and Dick Durbin, among others, have acknowledged that, as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it, "The military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq . . . appear to have produced some credible and positive results."

These results include, according to a well-placed officer in Baghdad, a 48% decline in civilian deaths across the entire country since December 2006 and a whopping 74% reduction in Baghdad, the focus of American and Iraq security efforts.

Faced with those impressive returns, surge opponents have tried to change the topic by pointing to the lack of political progress. They cite the Government Accountability Office report that found that the Iraqi government failed to meet 11 of 18 benchmarks and only partly met four others. But not one of these benchmarks relates to the most stunning and unexpected development of the last year: the decision by large numbers of Sunnis to take up arms against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

This movement started in Anbar province and has now spread to Diyala, Nineveh, Babil and other provinces, including parts of Baghdad. According to David Kilcullen, Petraeus' recently departed counterinsurgency advisor, the Sunni uprising "is now affecting about 40% of the country." If it continues, it could have far-reaching implications, political as well as military, because the more success that American and Iraqi security forces have against Al Qaeda (which is rabidly anti-Shiite), the more they undermine the claim that Shiite militias are necessary to protect their own people. "We might end up," Kilcullen writes, "with a revolt of the center against both extremes, which would be a truly major development."

...

Far from being already lost, as Reid said in April, the war is being won. But if our troops are to build on the momentum of the last few months, they will need more time and greater patience on the home front. That may be a hard pill for the body politic to swallow, but it's better than the alternative -- one of the worst military defeats ever suffered by this country and one of the biggest victories for Al Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran, temporarily united in their hatred for the Great Satan.

That is the stark choice and what is really crazy is that Democrats are still committed to losing in Iraq despite the success of the military. their desperation for defeat reflects much of their base that would rather blame President Bush for what happened on 9-11 than al Qaeda. You see this same attempt to delegitimize the war in Iraq by their denial of al Qaeda's war as the central front in their war against us. It is a part of the pathology of the left when it comes to the use of force and is one of the reasons they should never be trusted on national security issues.