I always defended the decision to go and many times told him he and his lefty brethren had picked the wrong team to root for, that in the end there would be statues of George Bush in Iraq, and streets named after Donald Rumsfeld.

I went to see him last week and he never brought up Iraq. I enjoyed every minute of watching him squirm, because he knew that I knew that events had proven him wrong. I never brought it up either, the day will come, so he will have to dread it for a while longer.

Once it sinks in that the Iraq war has been won, the MSM will do the same thing, just try not to talk about it.

Great post AJ, and WWS too!

And, yes, you do eat chickens for lunch!

Here’s a statement from the other article you referenced that really made me snicker: “But in Friday’s announcement he said he was referring only to battles with the Americans, not with Iraqi troops.”

He knows, as EVERYONE knows, that American ground troops aren’t fighting the Mahdi’s. They’re providing air cover and support to the Iraqi troops, who are doing all the fighting. (and the Iraqi’s NEED to be doing it, since that’s the only real way to turn a bunch of recruits into real soldiers) So there are no Americans available for the Mahdi’s to shoot at, unless they want to shoot at the predator drones that are taking out their mortar teams.

You are exactly right about this farce of a “cease-fire” – the Mahdi’s are fighting with everything they have and the IA is going after them without relenting. I can almost hear Sadr saying “oh yeah? You better quit, you better, or I’ll hit your fist with my eye again! Then I’ll turn around and pummel your steel-toed boot with my backside!”

With all this desperate defeatism, the MSM has completely missed (or deliberately lied?) about the fact that the IA has finally become a real Army, able to conduct operations on it’s own with minimal support (they don’t have much in the way of air assets yet) and able to WIN on its own.

Here’s what scares the MSM and the left the most – this single change means the war in Iraq, for all practices, is over. The Sunni bloc has come back to Parliament, the militias are integrated into the military, the Mahdi’s are destroyed, and the country is finally unified behind someone willing to lead it. That’s what victory looks like!

Now, does this mean that there will be no more terrorist attacks? Of course not, because getting rid of an asymmetric threat like that is going to be a “long tail” phenomena. (for those who don’t recognize the term, that’s an economic and mathematical term that is well worth researching, since it explains much of the modern world) Simply put, there will be a few people willing to do this kind of thing for a long, long time – but the number of incidents and number of people involved will gradually tail off, and these incidents will no longer have the power to influence the national direction.

Ladies and gentlemen, this war is over. And since the MSM and the left have *never* thought this was possible, they can’t and won’t believe it’s happening now. Which means that triumphant elections in October will come as a total surpise to them, as will the cessation of most hostilites this summer.

And the democrats, who bet on defeat, will be scrambling to explain what happened when they can’t understand it themselves.