Why are we finally succeeding in Iraq? Is it the surge?

Or is it the fabulous, all-knowing Joe Biden?

According to the Associated Press, “The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.”

Barack Obama sees “an enormous improvement” in Iraq, but he’s still, you know, opposed to the surge.

Welcome to the new Democratic Party, in which it’s possible to advocate two completely contradictory concepts at the same time, and pretend you don’t even notice the massive cognitive dissonance: Obama: If I had it to do over again, I’d still oppose the surge; Update: “Clearly there’s been an enormous improvement”.

Also see:
Soccer Dad: I’d rather we didn’t win

There’s new evidence tonight that Al Qaeda in Iraq is falling apart: U.S. Military Says Seized Docs Show Al Qaeda in Iraq Is Weakened.

BAGHDAD —  A diary and another document seized during U.S. raids show some Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders fear the terror group is crumbling, with many fighters defecting to American-backed neighborhood groups, the U.S. military said Sunday.

The military revealed two documents discovered by American troops in November: a 39-page memo written by a mid- to high-level Al Qaeda official with knowledge of the group’s operations in Iraq’s western Anbar province, and a 16-page diary written by another group leader north of Baghdad.

Click here for the English translation of the diary. (PDF)

Click here for the original version of the diary. (PDF)

In the Anbar document, the author describes an Al Qaeda in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants’ presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman.

“We lost cities and afterward, villages… We find ourselves in a wasteland desert,” Smith quoted the document as saying.

The memo — believed to have been written in summer 2007 — cites militants’ increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said.

UPDATE at 2/10/08 6:09:08 pm:

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius is noticing the difference too: Learning to Fight a War.

UPDATE at 2/10/08 6:22:00 pm:

Just last August, Barack Obama was pronouncing the Iraq War a “Complete Failure.”

That’s with a capital C and a capital F.

Pelosi yanks Murtha’s chain: Top House Dem aide on Murtha: “Pelosi is going to be furious” that the surge is working; Update: Murtha backtracks, “clarifies”.

Bill Amos has details and Allahpundit has some crow for Murtha to eat.

Newsbusters catches the world’s most unreliable major wire service, Agence France Press, publishing two completely opposite opinions on the Iraqi surge—by the same writer.

The situation in Iraq is getting worse and worse.

For the undertakers: As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch.

NAJAF, Iraq — At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

“I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead,” said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. “People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don’t talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more.”

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it’s 4,000 or less, he said.

(Hat tip: Miles.)

An Al Qaeda bag man who smuggled huge amounts of money into Iraq has been captured.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — An al Qaeda bag man smuggled $100 million into Iraq during the past few months to finance terrorist operations, according to the U.S. military.

The unidentified man, arrested Tuesday near Baghdad, allegedly employs 40 to 50 extremists at $3,000 per job for bomb attacks against coalition forces, using money from supporters outside Iraq, the military said.

“The extremist financier is suspected of traveling to foreign countries to acquire financial support for terrorist activities and is suspected of supplying more than $50,000 to al Qaeda each month,” the military said.

The suspect, captured during a coalition raid in Kindi, operates a network of financing cells across Iraq, the military said.

“He is believed to have received $100 million this summer from terrorist supporters who cross the Iraq border illegally or fly into Iraq from Italy, Syria and Egypt,” a Pentagon release said.

A rather amazing admission from British center-left magazine Prospect: Mission accomplished.

The question of what to do in Iraq today must be separated from the decision to topple Saddam Hussein four and a half years ago. That decision is a matter for historians. By any normal ethical standard, the coalition’s current project in Iraq is a just one. Britain, America and Iraq’s other allies are there as the guests of an elected government given a huge mandate by Iraqi voters under a legitimate constitution. The UN approved the coalition’s role in May 2003, and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam’s struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one.

Some just wars, however, are not worth fighting. There are countries that do not matter very much to the rest of the world. Rwanda is one tragic example; and its case illustrates the immorality of a completely pragmatic foreign policy. But Iraq, the world’s axial country since the beginning of history and all the more important in the current era for probably possessing the world’s largest reserves of oil, is no Rwanda. Nor do two or three improvised explosive devices a day, for all the personal tragedy involved in each casualty, make a Vietnam.

The great question in deciding whether to keep fighting in Iraq is not about the morality and self-interest of supporting a struggling democracy that is also one of the most important countries in the world. The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team’s success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq’s condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran.

Read the whole thing…