Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=305334612125102
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 03, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Iraq War: We interrupt coverage of Bristol Palin's pregnancy to announce that the U.S. has turned over control of Iraq's wild, wild west to Baghdad. Memo to Barack Obama: Soon you will have nothing left to surrender.
Read More: Iraq | Election 2008
On Monday, while Democrats waited to see if Hurricane Gustav would be another Katrina and the GOP juggled its convention schedule, U.S. commanders formally returned responsibility for security in Iraq's Anbar province to the Iraqi Army and police.
Maybe you missed it. The New York Times Web page had three stories on Bristol Palin. The Washington Post's online magazine, Slate, is running a "Name Bristol Palin's Baby" contest. And Us Weekly has "Babies, Lies and Scandal" on its cover.
Victory in Iraq can't compete in an environment where Bristol's boyfriend is more thoroughly investigated than Obama's lifelong association with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers.
The media prefer to ignore how wrong Obama was on the major foreign policy issue of the Bush years. He opposed the war and the surge. He supported cutting off funding. He sponsored a bill to have U.S. troops withdraw in defeat by March of this year, their sacrifice in vain. His policies would have led to a humanitarian and strategic disaster.
"I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence," he said in 2007. "In fact, I think it will do the reverse." When confronted by ABC News with the success of the surge, asking if he would have supported it knowing what he knows now, Obama's answer was "No."
He also tried to explain away the progress in Iraq, implying it was mere coincidence that it happened during the surge. Obama spoke of "a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops."
Well, it was the "terrific work of our troops" that provided the security umbrella under which Sunnis and Shiites could reconcile and turn their wrath on the jihadists and not each other.
The extra troops allowed a take-and-hold strategy that convinced Iraqis that America wouldn't cut and run. It would later be called the "Anbar Awakening."
In 2006, al-Qaida in Iraq declared Baqouba to be the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq, and said it controlled both Anbar and Diyala. In January 2007, CNN's Michael Ware described Ramadi, a city of 500,000 and Anbar's capital, as "the true al-Qaida national headquarters."
Anbar province was once considered lost. More than a thousand Americans died there, a quarter of our total casualties. Anbar's second city, Fallujah, was the scene of the biggest battle of the war, in which nearly 100 Americans died, with 500 wounded. That was then. This is now.
Monday's ceremony was actually a formality. Since April, the Iraqi army and police have operated independently in Anbar with the primary responsibility for insurgency and crime.
The victory parade down Ramadi's main street Monday saw American soldiers watching from the sidelines, wearing neither body armor nor helmets, not even carrying their weapons.
"Not in our wildest dreams could we have imagined this," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, who flew in from Baghdad. "Two or three years ago, had we suggested that the Iraqis could take responsibility, we would have been ridiculed, we would have been laughed at."
On Tuesday, General David Petraeus had another surprise, announcing that U.S. troops might be leaving Baghdad as early as next summer. Another defeat for the defeatists.
We love the smell of victory in the morning. Barack Obama, call your office.
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