November saw fewer attacks than any month since 2003. We have significantly degraded al-Qaida's ability to plan, to resource and to capitalize on ruthless attacks on the Iraqi people.
People around the world should rejoice that the Iraqi people are finally being delivered from the apocalyptic mayhem of the last few years. We have to thank a combination of new leadership in the Department of Defense, General David Petraeus' visionary counterinsurgency tactics, the surge of 30,000 additional American troops, the Sunni Awakening, and the repudiation and marginalization of Muqtada al-Sadr's gangsterism. These outcomes would have been realized much sooner but for the Bush administration's criminally negligent conduct of the war in its first three years.
As violence has declined democratic impulses in Iraq have germinated. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times reported the following:
Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.
That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.
Though I don't object to President-elect Barack Obama's plans to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, since the conditions have improved so drastically and the Iraqi parliament voted overwhelmingly for a plan to do so, I will never forget that Mr. Obama was colosally wrong to oppose the liberation of Iraq and the subsequent troop surge. If it had been up to him Saddam Hussein would not have been arraigned, convicted, and executed on charges of crimes against humanity, the mass graves would never have been unearthed, and the federal democracy now developing in Iraq would have been a hopeless abstraction. I look forward to his accomplishments in other areas of foreign policy, but on this issue history's verdict has already condemned him.
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