Our will to win is the only variable that can alter the vector toward victory.
And amazingly enough, the anti-war side seems immune to actual events.
Consider that one part of the anti-war coalition insists that Iraqis must reconcile according to benchmarks set by Congres earlier this year. One senator who flirts with opposing the war states:
In an interview in Time magazine's September 26 issue, the South Carolina Republican said he was giving the current Iraqi government until the end of the year to reach key political compromises.
Mr. Graham, a Republican who has been to Iraq 12 times since 2003, did not threaten to vote with Democrats to end the war as his Nebraska Republican colleague Chuck Hagel does. But he has implied that if deals were not inked on pensions and jobs for former senior Baathists, oil revenue sharing and federalism, his vote would no longer be with President Bush.
"If they can't pull it together in the next 90 days," he told Time, "I don't think they are ever going to do it." He then said that as a consequence, this politician who is up for re-election in 2008, would "openly say the chances for political reconciliation are remote."
Many already anti-war have been pounding on these benchmarks. So reconcile now--or we're gone.
Yet others insist that Iraqis must not reconcile and instead must separate themselves in a partition of Iraq. Add in the word "soft" to describe ethnic cleansing and it sounds like Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shias will land gently on their own pillows, screeching in delight. Iraqis don't like this idea and aren't fooled by the purported softness of the partition.
Of course, some in Congress aren't waiting to see if the benchmarks are met by Iraq's parliament or if Iraqis softly partition themselves. Some just want withdrawal plans put in place right away:
The House takes up legislation today that would require President Bush to submit a plan for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
The bill would require the administration to report to Congress on the status of redeployment plans in 60 days. Follow up reports would be required every 90 days thereafter.
Initially, Democratic leaders considered the bill too mild and instead focused on tougher measures that ordered troops home this fall. But those measures didn't pick up enough Republican support.
The latest bill doesn't set any timetable for a withdrawal and Republican leaders have said they will not oppose it.
Should Congress pass this, the President might want to consider an updated version of this withdrawal plan rather than veto a withdrawal bill sent to his desk.
Congress is speaking quite clearly to the Iraqis: they're damned if they do reconcile; damned if they don't split; and damned if they do neither.
Fortunately, the press is spending less time on Iraq, verifying the saying "no news is good news." Why is press coverage of events in Iraq declining? Well, because we are winning:
Things have gone so well, in fact, that leading Democratic contenders have stopped calling for a "timetable" for withdrawal and can't even promise they'll remove all the troops by 2013.
In short, the U.S. is — yes, we'll use the word —winning the war against al-Qaida. And not just in Iraq. In fact, the only way we won't win is if we do something very stupid — such as letting the overwhelmingly negative media convince us we can't do what we clearly are doing.
Meanwhile, our path to victory accelerates. That Iraqi clock is, for the time being, going faster than the Washington clock. And if the press continues to lose interest, that differential may not close in time to provide the defeat that too many here are eager to achieve.
Embrace the victory. Is it really something to regret?
UPDATE: The victory stories are starting to seep into the press. Here's one from London:
Three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide and antiShi’ite apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis.
As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team’s success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds – whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing – celebrated. Iraq’s condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran.
We've knocked down our enemies in Iraq, as I've noted before. And rulers who should be afraid when they go to sleep at night, have reason to fear a democracy in their midst.
And almost as important as the conclusion that we are winning is the understanding that our war is morally right. We are the good guys and our enemies very clearly the bad guys. While our side actually has the approval of the UN (yes, we do), the enemy are comic book villains in their clarity of evil:
The United Nations approved the coalition’s role in May 2003 and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Ba’athists, the Nazis of the Middle East; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam’s struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one.
The war was just. We are winning. And the bad guys are losing. And more bad guys have reason to worry.
