The Unthinkable Victory
Breaking news: the Iraq war is still over -- and won.
I think this makes it official: the liberal Brookings Institution is apparently no longer bothering to update their Iraq Index, with the last update having been done on September 1st. Final score: 8500-11000 MW of power (vs. 4000 prewar), vastly improved access to potable water/sanitation/trash removal, something like five hundred times as many cellphones, a million people with Internet access in a country that previously had essentially none, a tripling of GDP, billions in foreign investment, national debt halved, and thousands of trained judges. Even the endemic fuel shortages appear much ameliorated, with the number of Iraqis saying they had good access to fuel rising from 19% in 2008 to 68% this year. Oh yeah, and a fairly liberal Arab constitutional democracy with basic rights for minorities, including the rights of voting, free press, free assembly, and free speech.
Meanwhile, the security situation in Iraq is better than ever (and far, far better than the average ~7,000 a month killed under Saddam), with icasualties reporting an incredibly low 158 deaths total in September -- the lowest ever recorded.
This is all lending an odd, even surreal quality to the Afghanistan debate, where the "surrender now!" coalition (largely composed of people who, like Obama, vehemently insisted for years that our conflict in the Hindu Kush was the really important war that Bush should have been focused on) assiduously avoid mentioning (or, presumably, even thinking about) the awful reality of the profound, thoroughgoing American victory in Iraq they all said was impossible or even undesirable.
For them, Iraq is still literally the unthinkable victory. If they want to lay any claim to credible analysis of ongoing events in the GWOT, they will need to start acknowedging this basic, painful fact: we won.
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