The president's opponents never tire of declaring Iraq a lost cause and using this alleged failure as a club with which to beat Donald Rumsfeld, and through him, President Bush over the head.
Nevertheless, one must be an inveterate pessimist to see our Iraq policy as a failure. There is much cause for optimism for one who is inclined to see it and willing to look for it beyond the pages of the Old Media.
Take the information dispensed in a recent briefing by General Rick Lynch, for example. His entire briefing is here, but this part, excerpted by John Dwyer at The American Thinker, is especially interesting. General Lynch says this:
I want to talk about four specific indicators on operations here in Iraq, and I don't want to talk about what happened yesterday. I want to talk over a period of time to give you a sense of the trend lines that we see. And these are four that I've talked to you about before, but allow me to give you an update.
We believe that 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are conducted by foreign fighters-al Qaeda, Zarqawi commissioning foreign fighters to conduct these suicide attacks. Last year this time, across Iraq, we were averaging about 75 suicide attacks a day. Now we're averaging about 24 a day.
One of the reasons for that drawdown is not that Zarqawi and al Qaeda doesn't want to do it anymore, but effective border operations have been capturing foreign nationals at the border. And I talked you through last week in great detail what's happened on the Iraqi border. Last November the Iraqi government declared initial control of the borders, and over time they've placed Department of Border Enforcement personnel-20,000 people, on the borders, 258 border camps-to stop this flow of foreign nationals into Iraq, some of which are coming in to be used as suicide bombers.
So if you look closely at what's happened, just before the first of the year, we were averaging about 44 captured foreign nationals per month, and now we're down to less than half of that. The effect of that is reduction in the number of suicide attacks in Iraq: over 70 a year ago, 24 now.
I talked about IEDs and IEDs that are found and cleared. We have reached the point where almost 50 percent of the IEDs are found and cleared before they detonate. And people say, "Well, why is that?" A reason why that is, is the number of sophisticated bomb-makers we've been able to take off the battlefield here in Iraq.
There are indeed people with talent and capability that can build a reliable IED, one that will function as designed. What we've been doing is a conscious effort with the Iraqi security forces to take those guys off the battlefield and either kill or capture them. And you can see that we took out 115 in the year 2005. And since the first of the year, we've taken out an additional 26.
The effect of that is, IEDs are produced that are less effective. And in many cases, we're finding the people that are emplacing the IEDs are killed by their own IEDs, or the IEDs that are emplaced don't go off as detonated. And that's because of the conscious decision to kill or capture bomb-makers.
I talk every Thursday about the weapons caches and weapons finds. And if you looked over the years 2005, we came across 2,880 weapons caches and since the first of the year almost 900 weapons caches.
Again, this goes to the effectiveness of the insurgents. In order to be able to create effective IEDs, he's got to have technical expertise, and he's got to have the proper munitions. A lot of these weapons caches we found had old munitions, but a lot of them had relatively new munitions that could build an effective bomb.
So as we look for bomb-makers and as we look for weapons caches to this level of effect, we are reducing the effectiveness of IEDs, VBIEDs and suicide car bombs, suicide vest packs, and also by taking out foreign nationals as they come across.
But I believe that the most important indicator on these charts, on this quad chart, is this one. And that's the number of tips, actionable tips, that we are receiving from the people of Iraq. They have indeed reached the point where they're tired of the insurgency, and they realize that they are indeed the target of attacks by the insurgency. The numbers of attacks against civilians, as I told you before, has doubled in the last four months, is up by 86 percent just in the last nine weeks.
So the people of Iraq are tired of the insurgency, and what they're doing is calling in actionable tips or providing tips to the 250,000 members of the Iraqi security force that are patrolling the streets of Iraq.
Of course, none of these positive trends in Iraq matter to liberal opinion molders. Their agenda, unfortunately, is not to inform the American people, but rather to discredit Bush and defeat the Republicans. Consequently, the sort of news Gen. Lynch gives us will never make it onto our televisions or into our newspapers. Nevertheless, it appears to be the case that Iraq is slowly but steadily developing into a democratic state able to stand on its own feet against the insurgency. There are sure to be further stumbles along the way, more mistakes will be made, but the absolutely worst thing we could do at this point is to lose heart and give up.
To follow the advice of the Last Helicopter crowd at this stage of the game would be a blunder of world-shattering consequence. We must stand firm against those whose vision is so astigmatic that they cannot see America succeeding in any great enterprise. We must resist the defeatism of those like John Murtha and John Kerry who insist that we're losing and should quit the field.
What these gentlemen really mean is that we should guarantee that we lose in Iraq before Bush actually succeeds and garners the credit for an historic achievement. To have Bush succeed would be more than they could bear. We can be sure that if Bill Clinton were at the helm, and if he were doing things just as the Bush team has done them, mistakes and all, Murtha, Kerry, and the rest of the cut-and-runners in the Democrat party would be totally supportive of the effort.