The Liberation of Iraq is Working Precisely as I Hoped it Would

From the Wall Street Journal:

… al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda’s freedom of movement and command-and-control.

As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country “is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign.” So it’s all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits…

…One irony here is that Barack Obama is promising a rapid withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we can’t defeat al Qaeda unless we focus on Afghanistan. He opposed the Iraq surge on similar grounds. Yet it is the surge, and the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq, that has helped to demoralize al Qaeda around the world. Nothing would more embolden Zawahiri now than a U.S. retreat from Iraq, which al Qaeda would see as the U.S. version of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

It is far too soon to declare victory over al Qaeda. Still, Mr. Hayden’s upbeat assessment is encouraging, and it suggests that President Bush’s strategy of taking the battle to the terrorists is making America safer.

Lee ADDS: Ih Barak Obama, Harry ‘Hands Up’ Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and the pessimistic crowd of Liberals had their way, we would not be deciding who was to be our President as the choice would have been made for us. By Al Qaeda!