"Talks Are Set On Ending Battle of Iraq"

We've won, says Don Surber, which may or may not be premature but I'm not quite sure it can be evidenced from a "Declaration of Principles" reached on the future Iraq-US relationship.

Still, it sure seems like good news. Surber writes:

This should have made Page 1.

With a sailor kissing a nurse on Times Square.

Funny how while the Democrats were calling for a troop withdrawal and the surrender of Iraq to al-Qaeda — while the New York Times was even condoning genocide — President Bush changed course and won the war.

Incredible.

The New York Sun seems alone in thinking this is a big deal.

As I've said before, I'm not sure that Bush's change-of-course and Petraeus' new strategy won the war, so much as it helped take advantage of trends already underway. "The surge won the war" is a compelling narrative, direct and simple, but it may well be that Bush's blundering stubbornness earlier in the war, and of course our troops' amazing heroism in darker times, actually wore out the enemy and set the table for the victories that would later follow.

What won the war might have been Bush's "simplistic" and nuance-lacking determination that we would not give up no matter how bad things to get. In this one crucial determination he seems to have been right, even if he (arguably) got so much else wrong.

H/t CJ.

posted by Ace at 04:13 PM

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