Constitution Club

Along with the Horn of Plenty that has been the good news out of Iraq recently, there are areas of continued concern. There have been several good articles lately that have outlined some of the challenges that we need to overcome to consolidate our gains.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writing in the Financial Times gives a broad overview of some of the problems on the road to victory…

US policymakers and Iraq’s leaders need to understand the realities. The tactical victory they have secured in a third of the country could lead to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq and of the most violent and extreme Sunni Islamists. That prospect provides Iraq’s leaders with a real opportunity for political accommodation.

I cant say I agree with his take on everything, but it is a well informed pragmatic view.

Amir Taheri, in a New York Post column from Monday, weighs the good and the bad, as he terms it, out of Iraq…

IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances. Statistics of violence don’t begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

What is new is that now more Americans appear willing to acknowledge this - good news in itself. As long as the United States remains resolute in its support for the new Iraq, there will be more good news than bad from what is at present the main battlefield in the War on Terror.

There are real reasons to hope now. There are opportunities for the resolute and the brave.