Ed Morrissey at Hot Air writes that "Either the New York Times has replaced its entire editorial board, or the US has become so successful against al-Qaeda that they can't avoid reporting it. Today, Eric Schmitt informs the Times' readers that the US-led efforts against AQ and radical Islamist terrorism has the enemy in collapse, with its funding all but gone and popular support dissipating. Perhaps Manhattan pharmacies should stock up on smelling salts."
What is this deviation from liberal anti-Bush orthodoxy at the Times about which Morrissey writes?
Here's part of Schmitt's column:
The deadliest terrorist networks in Southeast Asia have suffered significant setbacks in the past three years, weakened by aggressive policing, improved intelligence, enhanced military operations and an erosion of public support, government officials and counterterrorism specialists say.
Three years after the region's last major strike - the attacks on three restaurants in Bali that killed three suicide bombers and 19 other people - American and Asian intelligence analysts say financial and logistical support from Al Qaeda to other groups in the region has long dried up, and the most lethal are scrambling for survival. In Indonesia, since 2005 authorities have arrested more than 200 members of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic group with ties to Al Qaeda. In the Philippines, an American-backed military campaign has the Abu Sayyaf Group, an Islamic extremist organization with links to Jemaah Islamiyah, clinging to footholds in the jungles of a handful of southern islands, officials said.
To be sure Southeast Asia is not the Middle East but it must nevertheless pain the Times to write that the terrorists are suffering and Bush's strategy is being vindicated in this part of the world. For five years his detractors at the Times and elsewhere have been telling us that Bush is incompetent, that his approach is all wrong, that the world hates us because of him, that we need to negotiate with terrorists not treat the conflict between us as a war. And yet the news over the last six months about the Global War on Terror has been consistently hopeful.
Imagine, though, where we'd be today had John Kerry, the avatar of surrender, won in 2004 or if Bush had listened to Barack Obama instead of John McCain and we had fled Iraq a year ago.
RLC
