While August is customarily a slow-news month, when the world is supposed to take time off from generating anything remarkable, there have clearly been momentous happenings in Iraq, both in terms of reality and in terms of perception.

Ralph Peters today is writing about it from Fallujah:

Of the two simultaneous missions under way - maturing a responsible government and advancing our own strategic interests - the latter is far more important. In fact, it’s vital. And on that track, we’re making stunning progress.

Out here in Anbar Province, al Qaeda did what religion-driven extremists always do eventually - they over-reached, setting the bar so high that nonfanatics couldn’t measure up (nor did they want to). The terrorists responded with a campaign of slaughter against their fellow Muslims.

Now the Sunni Arabs who were fighting so bitterly against us are fighting beside us to destroy al Qaeda in Iraq. And the terrorists are going down.

Out here in Anbar Province - long the most troubled in Iraq - the change has come so swiftly and thoroughly that it’s dazzling. Marines who were under fire routinely just months ago are now directing their former enemies in battle.

Although this trend has been reported, our battlefield leaders here agree that the magnitude of the shift hasn’t registered back home: Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat - rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims.

If we don’t quit, this will not only be a huge practical win - it’ll be the information victory we’ve been aching for.

No matter what the Middle Eastern media might say, everyone in the Arab and greater Sunni Muslim world will know that al Qaeda was driven out of Iraq by a combination of Muslims and Americans.

Think that would help al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Even now, the terrorists have to resort to lies about their prospective missions to gain recruits.

With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?

Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I’m here. And I’m listening to what they have to say. They’re confident as never before that we’re on the right path.

Should we rob them of their victory now and enhance al Qaeda by giving them a free win? How can we even contemplate quitting now?

I’ve been sitting down with Iraqis, too - including former enemies. They don’t want us to leave. They finally cracked the code. They need us. And although they’ve got a range of their own goals (not all of them tending toward Jeffersonian democracy), they’re unified in their hatred of al Qaeda.

Yesterday I listened as an American officer sought to restrain Iraqi security forces from attacking one of al Qaeda’s last strongholds prematurely - the local rage toward al Qaeda goes deeper than any column could communicate.

If our former enemies are willing to kill our enduring enemies, why abandon them?

In the build up to the point which we are now at, in advance of General Petraeus’s September report to congress, with Democrats like Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton conceding that the surge is having substantial success, it’s hard to identify a single pivotal point where things clearly turned around. However, one dramatic moment in the battle over perception was certainly the extensive article in Der Spiegel magazine from August 10th by Ullrich Fichtner, who journeyed through Iraq for three weeks, with the perspective of someone who had visited three previous times over the last four years. While Michael Yon and a very few others have provided reportage at this level of detail on the work of U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, there is certainly something especially resonant about reading it written by a German reporter who can offhandedly refer to “the Bush administration’s lies” (an internalized dogma, obviously) but when faced with reality has no choice but to acknowledge the genuinely astounding achievements made by U.S. forces in Iraq this year. If it doesn’t make you choke up to read about what American troops are achieving — and under circumstances where no one has the right to expect these kinds of successes — then it might be advisable to have your facility for choking up checked into. Of-course a big part of the picture is the degree to which al-Qaeda has sabotaged its own goals by, well, being al-Qaeda. That is, imposing lunatic religious dictums and other commands and enforcing them by slaughtering people. Still, no self-defeating policies of al-Qaeda could have sufficed for bringing the kind of progress to Iraq which has been achieved this year by the work and sacrifice of tenacious, intelligent, courageous and truly admirable U.S. troops, like Lt. Col. Eric Welsh or Lt. Col. Alfredo Mycue from the Der Spiegel story, and the soldiers they lead, along with countless others. So, I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is simply: may God bless the troops.

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