Below are two pieces that you should read if you want to understand just how well things are going in Iraq. While one would hate to be proven wrong by a slide back into a violent abyss, the fact is that for the moment, one cannot deny that Iraq has a chance to succeed.

Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm

BAGHDAD — At first, I didn’t recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

This is good news people, and a far better outcome than we would have had we “pulled out” and left them the chaos of a civil war.

Al Qaeda’s Defeat in Iraq

Senator Barack Obama’s answer to Katie Couric’s question a few days ago about why he thinks there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since September 11, 2001, was bizarre.

“Well,” he said, “I think that the initial invasion into Afghanistan disrupted al Qaeda. And that was the right thing to do. I mean, we had to knock out those safe havens. And that, I think, weakened them. We did some work in strengthening our homeland security apparatus here. Obviously, the average person knows that when they go to the airport, because they are goin’ through taking off their shoes … all that. The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself.” [Emphasis added.]

Jennifer Rubin correctly noted that Couric asked Obama why the U.S. has not been attacked, but let’s leave that aside. The notion that “we gave Al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself” is breathtakingly ahistorical.

…

The Al Qaeda leadership emphatically has not agreed with Obama that Iraq is a distraction. It has been their main event for years.

“The most important and serious issue today for the whole world,” Osama bin Laden said on December 28, 2004, “is this Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation. It is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world’s millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate.”

It’s only natural that an Arab-led and a mostly Arab-staffed terrorist group like Al Qaeda would be more concerned with a strategically critical country in the heart of the Arab Middle East than with a primitive non-Arab backwater in Central Asia.

Bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri explicitly spelled out Al Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq on July 9, 2005. “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq,” he said. “The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq.”

The war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq can plausibly be described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda. But the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot possibly be accurately described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda.

I’ve argued often on this blog (and on my radio show) that the Bush Administration intended to use Iraq not only as a showcase for a potential democracy, but (perhaps cynically) as flypaper. I challenge anyone to refute that point. As flypaper, it has been remarkably successful.

Even the basically reasonable argument by the left - that we are “creating” terrorists by remaining in Iraq - does not necessarily defeat the purpose of “flypaper.” At some point, we will leave, and the “creation” of terrorists ceases. In the interim, we killed 1000s of radicals by drawing them to a killing zone instead of chasing them around the globe using “policing” (as opposed to “fighting a war”) as the model.

“Bring em on!” indeed.

The first article points out that Iraq may just have a fighting chance at becoming a “democratic” nation. Even my liberal/anti-war friends agree that such a result is a dagger pointed at the heart of both Iran and Saudi Arabia (the true sources of terror in the world). Putting that dagger in place was likely Bush’s goal all along, and using Iraq as a way to mop up excess radical Islamists isn’t bad strategy, even if cynical and Machiavellian. It worked. Al Qaida is stuck in Waziristan awaiting death from above as their popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted.

Maybe in 10-20 years, Bush will get the credit he likely deserves. Today, we appear too deranged to do so. The unpopularity of the war, and the seeming unwillingness of Bush to reveal exactly what he was up to (with ‘Flypaper,” how could you?), may just get us a dangerously left American President (Obama). That may turn out not to have been worth it, especially if Obama does all he can to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (and yes, I believe that is Obama’s goal).

That said, we’ve rarely seen a President risk so much political capital to pursue an unpopular policy in a representative republic. People always say they want leadership, but when some one actually leads, they despise them for it. This is not to forgive Bush his failures on the economy, spending, and his crony driven administration. The fact is he lead, and the world (and Iraq) is better off for it.