TO the extent it can be said that news from an active war zone can be good, we’re now into the third month of good news from Iraq.
It’s not just that violence has receded in the most dangerous places both for American soldiers and Iraqis, though it has by every measure.
It is that the good guys are making genuine advances for the first time against the enemy in a war zone where there is no conventional battlefield – a war in which it is, by definition, difficult to measure gains as we’re used to measuring them, by the amount of territory captured or controlled.
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.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com