Will media be excited about troops returning in victory?

John Podhoretz:

It may be too early to say we're winning in Iraq, but heartening changes in the war plan suggest it wouldn't be crazy to think we're winning in one part of Iraq - the very part that some in the U.S. military were writing off last year.

A senior administration official told a small gathering of journalists here that the change in Anbar province, where local Sunnis have turned on the al Qaeda terrorists with whom they were once in common cause, is dramatic enough that it will be the first place in Iraq from which American troops can and will be withdrawn on the grounds that the gains there are significant and permanent.

First, 2,200 Marines based there who are due to leave this month won't be replaced. Then, unless things go south, a 3,500-strong brigade will leave in December and become part of the war's reserve force (meaning they'll be based aboard ships).

The numbers may not be huge - they add up to about 4 percent of the forces on the ground in Iraq - but it's worth remembering that a few weeks ago, Republican Sen. John Warner was given the star treatment by the media for calling on the Bush administration to withdraw 5,000 troops by Christmas.

If all this happens on the senior official's timetable, the Bush administration would actually be withdrawing 5,700 troops by Christmas. So perhaps the media will now celebrate the Bush administration's statesmanship the way it did John Warner's.

You may stop laughing now.

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But on the subject of most interest and concern to Petraeus' Democratic critics yesterday - the failure of Iraq political leaders to meet 18 "benchmarks" set by Congress - the two officials presented a surprising analysis.

There is significant political change, they said, but the change is happening at the local and provincial level. The sorts of advances made in Anbar province are beginning to take place elsewhere, as Iraqis decide to take control of their own future rather than waiting for Baghdad to figure it all out.

"There is no Iraqi Nelson Mandela," said one official.

Saddam Hussein killed off almost all of those who might have figured out ways to achieve reconciliation among hostile factions. And there was no political class in post-Saddam Iraq ready to take the reins of power.

"Only now is politics beginning to work in Iraq," the official said.

But it's working more quickly outside of Baghdad. Just as the improvement in the security situation in Anbar was unexpected, the ground-up improvements in Iraqi politics are not following a script we wrote. But they are being enhanced by the increased security American forces are helping to provide, as well as the training we are offering.

What a difference a year makes. It was a exactly year ago today, Sept. 11, 2006, that Tom Ricks of The Washington Post published what may have been the most frightening article of the war so far. He revealed the existence of a classified memo written by Col. Pete Devlin, the Marine Corps' chief of intelligence in Anbar.

Devlin said flatly that Anbar was all but lost. He said, Ricks wrote, that "the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there."

Here's what Gen. Petraeus said yesterday: "The change in the security situation in Anbar province has, of course, been particularly dramatic. Monthly attack levels in Anbar have declined from some 1,350 in October 2006 to a bit over 200 in August of this year. This dramatic decrease reflects the significance of the local rejection of al Qaeda and the newfound willingness of local Anbaris to volunteer to serve in the Iraqi army and Iraqi police service."

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The Democrats big problem with the Petraeus withdrawals will be that they are being done on teh basis of success and not failure. They have been desperate for failure in Iraq and wanted troop withdrawals done as an admission of failure. More than anything else they want a policy failure in Iraq. They want to be able to argue that the use of force will almost always lead to a fiasco and disaster and success undermines this goal.

Their arguments with Gen. Petraeus' strategy have never been about strategy. They probably do not even comprehend the concept of strategy, much less the concept of counterinsurgency strategy. Their real objection is to the policy of defeating the enemy in Iraq. What frightens them now is that Gen. Petraeus and our forces are actually defeating the enemy and that has gotten them into a name calling panic.