Voices From Iraq The Left Doesn't Want Us To Hear

Failure in Iraq, failure in Iraq: It's the drum beat of the Left heard loud and repetitiously in DC this weekend, among the puppets and play actors. All the noise and silliness is intended to drown out the emerging truth in Iraq, a truth that's very threatening to the anti-Bush, anti-progress Progressives.

Today's Opinion Journal has news of exactly the sort they Left wants to drown out: the latest column by Fouad Ajami giving us loud and clear the voices from inside Iraq.

Voices that don't say we're winning, but that we've won.

"Little more than two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanon War of 1982, the American position in this region was exposed and endangered. Look around you today: Everyone seeks American protection and patronage. The line was held in Iraq; perhaps America was overly sanguine about the course of things in Iraq. But that initial optimism now behind us, the war has been an American victory. All in the region are romancing the Americans, even Syria and Iran in their own way." -- Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi

"We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude. To them I say, you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars, and we have now come into the light. A teacher used to work for $2 a month, now there is a living wage, and indeed in some sectors of our economy, we are suffering from labor shortages." -- Nouri al-Malaki

And here's an unnamed Iraqi speaking about the recently murdered anti-al Qaeda tribal leader Abu Reisha, a murder the Left gleefully trumpeted as another sign of failure in Iraq:

"No doubt he was shooting at Americans not so long ago, but the tide has turned, and Abu Reisha knew how to reach an accommodation with the real order of power. The truth is that the Sunnis launched this war four years ago, and have been defeated. The tribes never win wars, they only join the winners."

The Left has not yet even recognized that we can win in Iraq, let alone even conceive the idea that we have won and our purpose now is to sustain the victory.

That leaves this holding onto this purpose: To steal defeat from victory.

hat-tip: RCP