Only Hitchens can say the obvious with such power and force. A tidbit:

A few weeks ago, in Britain’s Prospect magazine, the paper’s foreign editor, Bartle Bull, published a bold essay saying that the high tide of violence in Iraq was essentially behind us and that the ebb had disclosed some interesting things. First, the Iraqi people as a whole had looked into the abyss of civil war and had drawn back from the brink. Second, the majority of Sunni Arabs had realized that their involvement with al-Qaida forces was not a patriotic “insurgency” but was instead a horrific mistake and had exposed their society to the most sadistic and degraded element in the entire Muslim world. Third, the Shiite militias had also come to appreciate that they had overplayed their hand.

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I read the article and admired its nerve, but I didn’t really choose to believe it. It didn’t appear to me that things had yet bottomed out, and it didn’t seem believable that the essential sectarianism of the Maliki regime, illustrated so graphically by its crude execution of Saddam Hussein, could be explained away.

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Keeping all this in mind, it nonetheless does begin to look as if Iraqis may in fact have started to recover command over their own destiny, and also as if America may have helped them to do so.

Liberals take note. This is how you admit you were wrong and take pride in, and give hope that, success in Iraq will continue to spread and grow deeper. Being wrong is OK, denying it through fantasy filled delusions is what makes simple mistake historically bad ones.