The significance of WaPo's retreat to victory in Iraq

John Podhoretz:

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A report in yesterday's Washington Post says flatly: "The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al Qaeda in Iraq in recent months."

This sentence is significant for two reasons.

First, it has not been the habit of the U.S. military to offer happy-talk assessments of our strategic position in Iraq - certainly not since 2003. Politicians, yes. Washington officials, yes. Conservative journalists and pundits (alas), yes. But not the U.S. military itself.

Second, the sentence was written by Thomas Ricks and Karen De Young. They are, respectively, the lead military correspondent and the lead foreign-affairs correspondent for The Washington Post - and they have been the most pointedly pessimistic and negative voices among the informed U.S. media on the subject of the war in Iraq.

Both occupy a vaunted position - though not officially opinion writers, they plainly have wide latitude to write "news" stories that openly reflect their own views as much as they do the views of those they quote.

Ricks is the author of "Fiasco," a powerful and sobering book on the failures of the first two years of the war. De Young's view of the changing U.S. strategy in Iraq has been relentlessly downbeat.

The fact that the two of them collaborated on an article that accepts the crippling of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as a fact is a significant moment in the coverage of this war. Time has mostly been kind to the skepticism they have expressed, and they are both professionally invested in the notion that the war is a failure.

It therefore means something - something important - that Ricks and De Young would co-author an article about a potential turning point in America's favor.

"There is," they write, "widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a 'cascade effect,' leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason."

They offer many caveats, likening the current excitement to the optimism in 2006 when the head of AQI, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was killed.

But that comparison doesn't make sense logically. The elimination of Zarqawi was grounds for hope that AQI would lose effectiveness. That hope proved groundless. Today's sense of change is based on concrete results over the course of several months.

Officials do worry that these successes might be transitory - or that they might be a little beside the point. A terrorist group like AQI need only pull off one spectacular attack against a civilian target to do the evil work of setting back the effort to move forward with a new political reality in Iraq.

They're right to worry, and it appears the implicit purpose of Ricks and De Young is not really to highlight the sea change in Iraq but rather to kill off a premature effort to declare victory against AQI. The article even goes so far as to name the general who is advancing the idea - Stanley McChrystal, who is in charge of special operations in Iraq.

We'll know in a year's time whether McChrystal got it right. At this moment, though, it is very interesting indeed that Thomas Ricks and Karen De Young are starting to test the possibility that, in their understandable despair after the many U.S. failures in the first 3½ years of the Iraq war, they might have gotten it wrong.

There is a tendency to war reporting to think that trends are predictors of success or failure. You have to look to the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the two sides to really determine a likely outcome. Al Qaeda never really had the military capacity to defeat US forces in Iraq even under the old strategy. Its hope was that Democrats in Washington would bail them out, but Bush's determination to win and his finding a commander who could speed the demise of al Qaeda is what made the difference. If a Democrat had been in charge of the war we would have lost.

The win is far more important than Iraq and democracy in the middle east. It is a defeat for a way of making war. Democrats and the enemy thought that we could not defeat this way of making war through insurgencies. With its defeat we are less likely to have to fight insurgencies in the future, which should mean there will be fewer wars. This is a strategic defeat for not only al Qaeda but for the MoveOn Democrats. We need to make sure the American people realize this before the next election.