Peter Wehner
The Wall Street Journal (Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
28 July 2007

'This [Iraq] war is lost," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has stated emphatically and without qualification. "There's simply no evidence that the escalation is working," he said recently. It requires "blind hope, blind trust" to believe in progress of any sort.

Sen. Reid is now in the position of having to deny facts on the ground in order to sustain his bleak judgments. And his job is getting more difficult all the time.

Shiite death-squad activity and executions in Baghdad have significantly decreased since January. In Anbar Province and increasingly in Diyala Province, tribal sheikhs have turned against al Qaeda and are now siding with American and Iraqi Security Forces (these are examples of "bottom-up" political reconciliation for which we had been hoping). Attack levels in Anbar have reached a two-year low. Ramadi, once among the most dangerous cities in Iraq, is now dramatically safer. Violence in Fallujah has declined. Al Qaeda's networks and safe havens are being disrupted beyond anything we have seen before.

Since the start of the year, Baqubah, al Qaim, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi, Habbaniya, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and Arab Jabour have all been liberated from al Qaeda control. Arms caches are being found at more than three times the rate of a year ago. Intelligence tips are sharply up. We are also seeing signs of normalcy return to Baghdad, including soccer leagues, amusement parks and vibrant market places. More than half of Baghdad is now under the control of coalition or Iraqi Security Forces.

"We have achieved . . . a reasonable degree of tactical momentum on the ground," according to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. "Gains against the principal near-term threat, al Qaeda-Iraq, and also gains against what is another near-term threat, and also potentially the long-term threat, Shia militia extremists as well." About al Qaeda in Iraq, the cautious Gen. Petraeus said this: "We think that we have them off plan."

The surge in operations -- as opposed to simply the surge in forces -- is just beginning. Operation Phantom Thunder, the largest multiphase operation since 2003, began on June 15.

None of this means success is preordained or the gains we have seen are irreversible. It is an exceedingly tough endeavor. Iraq remains a dangerous and violent nation, and al Qaeda in Iraq will try to make it more so in the coming months, in order to influence the American political process. Sectarian splits remain deep, and deeply problematic. Political progress is slower than anyone wants.

It's possible that the U.S. offensive will falter, that the enemy will adjust to our tactics or that Iraqi society is just too fractured to be rebuilt. But in terms of security, we are in significantly better shape than we were six months ago, and the trajectory of events is positive.

What, then, explains the fact that some critics of the war are unwilling to hear good news of any sort -- and get visibly agitated and disdainful when we see (and cite) signs of progress? Why won't they acknowledge empirical evidence of progress by the American military? And why are some critics of the war frantically attempting to make a final judgment on the war even before Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker provide their assessment in September?

It is as if some critics of the new strategy have decided that the war shouldn't have been fought, cannot be won, and therefore defeat is now written in the stars -- and since surrender will eventually happen, let's get on with it.

This is, to put it mildly, a curious position to adopt, particularly given the stakes of this struggle and all that might happen in the aftermath of an American defeat. Whether we like it or not, al Qaeda has made Iraq a central battlefield in their jihadist campaign.

In the words of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's ideological leader, Iraq "is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era." Just a few weeks ago, in a taped message, al-Zawahiri urged Muslims to "hurry to Iraq." It's reasonable to assume he wasn't recommending it because he thinks it's a world-class tourist attraction.

The critics of the war know, deep in their bones, that an American retreat may well lead to ethnic cleansing and genocide, massive refugee flows and regional destabilization, spreading civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, creating a new safe haven for terrorists and giving an enormous psychological victory for America's enemies, from Iran to Syria to al Qaeda.

In the current issue of Commentary, Gal Luft and Anne Korin of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security put it this way: "Iraq [is] the current vortex of both regional and inter-denominational strife. A decent resolution of that conflict will hasten the reform and modernization of other nations, Sunni and Shiite alike. If our project there fails, whether from Arab indifference and incapacity or a lack of Western resolve, the resulting civil war could feed the flames of both intra- and extra-Islamic conflict on a global scale."

To repeat, then: Why the rush to declare the war irretrievably lost, when doing so requires one to be deaf and blind to what is now unfolding on the ground? Why, given the importance of this struggle, are so many critics of the war unwilling to support, or even wait to hear from, Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in September?

Perhaps this attitude is rooted in war weariness. The Iraq war has been a long and difficult struggle. Mistakes and misjudgments have been made, false summits have dashed early hopes, and more than 3,600 American military lives have been lost, causing unspeakable grief for families and friends of the fallen. Yet tragically, more often than not, this is the nature of war, which involves unexpected costs and awful sacrifices.

There comes a point in many wars, maybe in most wars, where the single most important issue is whether a nation can summon the resolve and courage to see a good cause through to the end. We are now at that point in the Iraq war. We have in place the right team, pursuing the right strategy. The thing Gen. Petraeus needs above all else, he says, is time.

The American political class can give him that time, if it chooses. We are not passive actors in this clash of force and wills, and defeat is not fated. We can still shape the outcome of the war, and with it, the future of the Middle East.

In the past this nation, in the face of great challenges and hardships, worn and weary, has ridden out the storm of war. In so doing, tyrannies have fallen, captives have been set free, and history has honored America's sacrifice and its role in building a more hopeful world. It will do so again, if we can, one more time, summon the will.

Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.