In Other News

As the country turns its attention to a 17-year-old pregnant girl and Hurricane Gustav hammering the Gulf Coast, one piece of news that seems to be lacking its fair share of coverage is the recent transfer of security responsibilities in Anbar province.

In a ceremony yesterday, the United States military officially handed over the responsibilities to Iraqi forces and is part of the continued military effort to transfer all provinces to Iraqi control.

A few years ago, many thought the security situation in Anbar was not salvageable and demonstrated why the United States could never succeed in Iraq.

Now, the security improvements in Anbar leading to the transfer of power stand as a testament to our brave men and women in uniform.

From the famous Washington Post September 2006 story which leaked a memo from Pete Devlin, the Marine's chief intelligence officer:

"Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar."

Things even reportedly got worse later that year:

"The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that, as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. 'The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality' remain the same, the official said."

Putting yesterday's event in proper context demonstrates just how much the situation in Iraq has improved.

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial does a better job at aligning that history with yesterday's ceremony:

For U.S. politics, it is worth recalling that that 2006 Washington Post story became part of a Beltway consensus that defeat in Iraq was inevitable. Democrats made withdrawal the center of their campaign to retake Congress, Republicans like Senator John Warner became media darlings for saying the war couldn't be won, and the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group laid out a bipartisan road to retreat. According to memos disclosed Sunday in the New York Times, even senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon opposed the surge. President Bush, heeding Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno as well as John McCain, overruled the defeatists and ordered a renewed U.S. commitment to Iraq.

The Anbar handover is above all a tribute to the hundreds of Americans who have fought and died in places like Fallujah, Ramadi and Hit over these last five years. Over the horizon of history, we tend to recall only the successes in previous wars at such places as Guadalcanal, Peleliu and the Chosin Reservoir. We forget that those wars and battles were also marked by terrible blunders and setbacks, both political and military. What mattered is that our troops, and our country, had the determination to fight to an ultimate victory. So it is with the heroes of Anbar.