Voices from around the Web

Tomorrow Iraqis will elect their own government, and unlike Saddam's "elections", this time their votes will count. Their votes are all that will count. Iraqis will continue on this bumpy journey of learning how to forge a government out of an alloy of competing interests and goals. Their neighbors must look on with envy.

With Senator Joe Lieberman being just about the lone exception, the Defeatocrats have been all but unanimous in their steady drumbeat of doom and gloom, of calls for withdrawal, of using casualties as examples of American failure. All the while, apparently deaf to the steady chorus of good news in Iraq, of palpable signs of improvement.

Here are some of voices being heard around the Web today. These voices counsel that yes, there is still work to be done in Iraq, all is not sweet balm and roses. But, the voices say in unison that there is hope for Iraq, that this election did not just fall out of sky. Many have worked and sacrificed and died to make it happen. The enemy cannot slake its thirst for blood, and has brought much destruction to Iraq, but we are winning. We are winning.

Message to the Arab world: Democracy works

Iraqis will go to the polls tomorrow for the third time this year. Their actions mark both a triumph for the Iraqi people and a warning for Arab autocrats. Not only has the Iraqi march toward democracy proved naysayers wrong, but Iraqis' growing embrace of democracy demonstrates the wisdom of staying the course. Iraqis are changing political culture. Howard Dean and John Murtha may believe that the U.S. military has lost. Brent Scowcroft may think Arab democracy a pipe dream. They are mistaken.

Colonel Kline Reports On Iraq

What’s happened is progress, really measurable progress. You can see it. The Iraqi battalions--there are now over 40 of them in the lead, which means that you have an American battalion that’s partnered with an Iraqi battalion, but when you go to do an operation, it’s the Iraqi battalion that is leading the attack, and the American battalion that is hanging back, both in the planning and in the execution. And then you have over 30 Iraqi battalions that actually control territory. We’ve turned over geography to them, and said, call us if you need us.
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The good news story is just shamefully lost where you get somebody like John Murtha saying, we’re not making any progress, and you get someone like Howard Dean saying we can’t win. What is that possibly based on? Because all information on the ground in Iraq refutes that.

The Truth On the Ground

It is difficult for most Americans to rationalize this optimism in the face of the horrific images and depressing stories that have come to symbolize the war in Iraq. Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success. For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability. Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false. Although the presence of U.S. forces certainly inflames sentiment and provides the insurgents with targets, the anti-coalition insurgency is mostly a symptom of the underlying conditions in Iraq. It may seem paradoxical, but only our presence can buffer the violence enough to allow for eventual stability.

It's only a matter of hours now!

Me and my friends were sitting discussing “who’s best for Iraq?” and the reasons on which each one of us based his/her opinion. I was seeing a drastic change in the sense of the historic responsibility we shoulder. I see my friends call their friends and acquaintances encouraging them to vote for this candidate or that list and putting effort in convincing them with this or that idea.

In a matter of one year questions and answers changed a lot; less than a year ago the question was “will you vote?” But now the question is "who are you going to vote for?" We are making progress, definitely we are!

The Media's War

The media seem to have come up with a formula that would make any war in history unwinnable and unbearable: They simply emphasize the enemy's victories and our losses.
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Our troops can kill ten times as many of the enemy as they kill and it just isn't news worth featuring, if it is mentioned at all, in much of the media. No matter how many towns are wrested from the control of the terrorists by American or Iraqi troops, it just isn't front-page news like the casualty reports or even the doom-saying of some politicians.

The fact that these doom-saying politicians have been proved wrong, again and again, does not keep their latest outcries from overshadowing the hard-won victories of American troops on the ground in Iraq.

On the eve of the Iraqi elections

And what he feels, apart from pride I think, is a resurgence of hope. The most lasting achievement of enemy propaganda in Vietnam was to destroy hope; to eliminate any possibility of the conception of victory, so that in the end it became, as it did for Howard Dean, a bad word. For that reason it necessary to rescue the idea of victory from its fallen state, not to revive it as gaudy triumphalism, but to restore it as a real measure of achievement; and to recognize in it the fruit of sacrifice. There's a distance yet to go, but -- and let no one deny it -- a long road behind.

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Michelle Malkin is also listening to the voices of hope.