Thread: The Thrill Of Victory

Was this in the main stream media and I missed it.?

UB


The Thrill Of Victory
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Iraq: Nineteen months after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war "lost," a freely elected Iraqi Parliament signs a security pact with the United States. We won. It is the terrorists and their appeasers who lost.

While Americans sat down for Thanksgiving dinner deciding what they were thankful for, the Iraqi parliament Thursday passed an agreement with the U.S. that set a date certain for American withdrawal, as war critics wanted. But it was based on conditions on the ground, as the Bush administration insisted.

The conditions on the ground are that the jihadists are a spent force that lost the war as well as the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Province after province has been returned to Iraqi control, and the young Iraqi nation appears both willing and able to defend itself.

Under the terms of the agreement, U.S. forces will withdraw from Iraqi towns and cities by June 30, 2009, and the entire country by Jan. 1, 2012. The deal could still be rejected by the Iraqi people in a referendum scheduled for July 30, a key Sunni demand to get their agreement, but by then U.S. troops will no longer be a visible presence in urban areas.

"This is a historic day for the great Iraqi people," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in a 10-minute address on national television. "We have achieved one of its most important achievements in approving the agreement on the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and restoring the sovereignty it lost two decades ago," al-Maliki said, referring to the imposition of sanctions after Operation Desert Storm liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

"Two years ago, this day seemed unlikely," Bush said in a statement from his retreat at Camp David, Md. "But the success of the surge and the courage of the Iraqi people set the conditions for these two agreements to be negotiated and approved by the Iraqi parliament."

The pact is divided into two agreements governing security, economics, culture and other areas of cooperation.

The pact comes after a report on Iraq's progress that retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, now an adjunct professor of International Affairs at the United States Military Academy at West Point, compiled for his colleagues.

The report concludes: "The United States is now clearly in the end game in Iraq to successfully achieve what should be our principle objectives: the withdrawal of the majority of U.S. ground combat forces . . . in the coming 36 months; leaving behind an operative civil state and effective Iraqi security forces; an Iraqi state which is not in open civil war among the Shia, the Sunnis, and the Kurds; and an Iraqi nation which is not at war with its six neighboring states."

Provisional elections are scheduled for January, district elections for midyear and national elections sometime next December. Of al-Maliki, who, like President Bush, may have been "misunderestimated," McCaffrey says he "clearly has matured and gained stature as a political leader since he assumed his very dangerous and complex leadership responsibilities."

The surge of Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of CENTCOM, took that country from a chaos beyond imagination to a functioning democracy where children walk to school safely, civilians stroll past stocked businesses and old men sit at cafes talking about politics.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, thankfully kept on by President-elect Obama, presided at Petraeus' retirement ceremony in Baghdad, and told the story of the best command decision a commander in chief has made since Lincoln sacked McClellan, put Grant in charge, and pointed Sherman in the direction of Atlanta.

After Petraeus took charge, Gates noted, "Slowly, but inexorably, the tide began to turn, our enemies took a fearsome beating they will not soon forget. Fortified by our own people and renewed commitment, the soldiers of Iraq found new courage and confidence. And the people of Iraq, resilient and emboldened, rose up to take back their country."

And now Johnny will soon come marching home. We love the smell of victory in the morning.

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Iraq: What would happen if the U.S. won a war but the media didn't tell the American public? Apparently, we have to rely on a British newspaper for the news that we've defeated the last remnants of al-Qaida in Iraq.


London's Sunday Times called it 'the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.' A terrorist force that once numbered more than 12,000, with strongholds in the west and central regions of Iraq, has over two years been reduced to a mere 1,200 fighters, backed against the wall in the northern city of Mosul.


The destruction of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) is one of the most unlikely and unforeseen events in the long history of American warfare. We can thank President Bu sh 's surge strategy, in which he bucked both Republican and Democratic leaders inWashington by increasing our forces there instead of surrendering.


We can also thank the leadership of the new general he placed in charge there, David Petraeus, who may be the foremost expert in the world on counter-insurgency warfare. And we can thank those serving in our military in Iraq who engaged local Iraqi tribal leaders and convinced them America was their friend and AQI their enemy.


Al-Qaida's loss of the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis began in Anbar Province, which had been written off as a basket case, and spread out from there.


Now, in Operation Lion's Roar the Iraqi army and the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is destroying the fraction of terrorists who are left. More than 1,000 AQI operatives have already been apprehended.


Sunday Times (London) reporter Marie Colvin, traveling with Iraqi forces in Mosul, found little AQI presence even in bullet-ridden residential areas that were once insurgency strongholds, and reported that the terrorists have lost control of its Mosul urban base, with what is left of the organization having fled south into the countryside.


Meanwhile, the State Department reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has achieved 'satisfactory' progress on 15 of the 18 political benchmarks 'a big change for the better from a year ago.'


Things are going so well that Maliki has even for the first time floated the idea of a timetable for withdrawal of American forces. He did so while visiting the United Arab Emirates , which over the weekend announced that it was forgiving almost $7 billion of debt owed by Baghdad, an impressive vote of confidence from a fellow Arab state in the future of a free Iraq.


But where are the headlines and the front-page stories about all this good news? As the Media Research Center pointed out last week, 'the C BS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 were silent Tuesday night about the benchmarks 'that signaled political progress.'


The war in Iraq has been turned around 180 degrees both militarily and politically because the president stuck to his guns. Yet apart from IBD, Fox News Channel and parts of the foreign press, the media don't seem to consider this historic event a big story.


Copyright 2008 Investor's Bus iness Daily. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticle ... 6777232348

No, you didn't miss it UB because our lackluster, biased MSM didn't want it there. You know...if Bush has anything good happen on his watch the MSM just ignores it. They would rather give slobbering over-coverage to the BO hollywood inaguration ball.