There's been real progress in Iraq

Jonathan Blake
Star Tribune
December 8, 2005

In its Dec. 1 editorial "Bush creates illusion of progress in Iraq," the Star Tribune editorial staff takes President Bush to task for exaggerating postwar progress in Iraq. This is a continuation on a tired theme the administration's critics have used since early in the war.

Saddam Hussein is out of power and no longer a threat to his region. Iraq has ratified a constitution and is on the verge of electing a permanent government. And the allegiance between Saddam loyalists and global terrorists is clearer than ever. And yet the administration's critics have launched an all-out attack on the president and his entire rationale for the war. Why?

First and foremost, because the war is now less popular with the public than it used to be. Polls are powerful things, especially to some of our vacillating politicians.

But it is also a response to our failure to find weapons of mass destruction. On WMD, there's no question the administration had flawed intelligence. But it shared this mistake with the Clinton administration, congressional Democrats, the United Nations and nearly every Western government. This doesn't render any criticism of the Bush administration moot, but it does render much of it disingenuous.

As for the editorial's assertion that progress in Iraq is an "illusion" and "does not exist," it's simply untrue. In a few short years, Iraq has held two successful elections, ratified a constitution (albeit an imperfect one), and gotten rid of a murderous dictator. In a nation that previously had no independent media outlets, there are now more than 70 radio stations and 100 newspapers. In a recent poll by the nonpartisan International Republican Institute, 56 percent of Iraqis believed their situation would be better in six months. And this past Thursday, the U.S. military announced that suicide bombings in Iraq had fallen to their lowest level in seven months.

In President Bush's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on Nov. 30, he touted the vastly improved Iraqi forces that are increasingly taking control of their own country. There are now 127 Iraqi army and police combat battalions in action, each comprising between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces. And every 10 weeks, another 3,500 Iraqi police officers are trained and out patrolling their streets.

For a supposedly failed state, that's impressive progress.

Jonathan Blake, Woodbury, is a research fellow with the Center of the American Experiment.