News From Iraq???

When things were going badly we had daily updates in the MSM. So you know when you aren't hearing about Iraq on the news, things must be going well.

Investor's Business Daily gives us this:

Media And War: Ever since the Sept. 10 testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, we've heard less and less from the mainstream media about the war in Iraq. The old adage "no news is good news" has never been truer.

• On Monday came news that U.S. military deaths in Iraq fell to 64 in September, the fourth straight drop since peaking at 121 in May and driving the toll to a 14-month low.

• Civilian deaths also have plunged, dropping by more than half from August to 884.
Remember just six months ago all the talk of an Iraqi "civil war"? That seems to be fading.

• The just-ended holy month of Ramadan in Iraq was accompanied by a 40% drop in violence, even though al-Qaida had vowed to step up attacks.

• Speaking of al-Qaida, the terrorist group appears to be on the run, and possibly on the verge of collapse — despite making Iraq the center of its war for global hegemony and a new world order based on precepts of fundamentalist Islam.

• Military officials say U.S. troops have killed Abu Usama al-Tunisi, a Tunisian senior leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who was responsible for bringing foreign fighters into the country. Not surprisingly, the pace of foreign fighters entering Iraq has been more than halved from the average of 60 to 80 a month.

• Last month, 1,200 Iraqis waited patiently in line in Iraq's searing heat to sign up to fight al-Qaida. They will join an estimated 30,000 volunteers in the past six months — a clear sign the tide has turned in the battle for average Iraqis' hearts and minds.

• Finally, and lest you think it's all death and destruction, there's this: Five million Iraqi children returned to school last week, largely without incident, following their summer vacations.

None of this, of course, is accidental. The surge of 28,500 new troops announced by President Bush last February, and put in place in mid-June by Gen. Petraeus, seems to have worked extraordinarily well. Al-Qaida, though still a potent foe capable of committing mass atrocities, has been backpedaling furiously.

"They are very broken up, very unable to mass, and conducting very isolated operations" is how Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson described al-Qaida's situation in comments this week.

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.

The TimesOnline even has this article titled "How we've won the war in Iraq" byBartle Bull who has spent time living with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq and writes for The New York Times and Washington Post. Read the whole thing. Here is a snippet:

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.

And finally Victor David Hanson sums it up:

The United States must put its financial house in order, curtail its imported oil, stabilize Iraq, prevent somehow Iran from getting a bomb, find ways to continue to support democratic reform in the Middle East without providing one-vote, one-time plebiscites to radical Islamists, and explain all that we are doing — and why — far more coherently and eloquently to the American public.

But the current orthodoxy that America is losing the war on terror inside and outside Iraq, while bereft of allies, is simply not true. Instead we are winning — it’s ugly perhaps, but winning nonetheless.

Let me know when the NYT's does this story.

h/t to BigDog