One of the most infuriating aspect of the GWOT is its circularity–we keep rehashing the same old arguments about the mission in Iraq, though speeches the President and his subordinates delivered to justify the war haven’t changed in about 2.5 years. I’m sorry, but if you don’t know the arguments that led to war in Iraq by now that’s your own fault. They have been a Google search away from your fingertips for years. Also a Google search away have been the Clinton administration’s own arguments for attacking Iraq–in 1998–that read almost word for word with the Bush administration arguments of 2002 and 2003. Just Google “Clinton Iraq 1998″ if you don’t believe me. You will find Madeline Albright saying some shockingly Rumsfeldian things.

Because we invaded, the facts on the ground in Iraq itself have changed–we didn’t find the large caches of WMD we expected, for instance, though we have found smaller caches and labs scattered around Iraq along with evidence that Saddam was just waiting for the UN sanctions to go away before resuming his work an NBC weapons. And we now know that Saddam was using Oil-For-Food corruption to pry the sanctions lid loose, and that that effort was succeeding: Support for maintaining the no-fly zones via US and UK aircraft, at which Saddam ordered his anti-air batteries to fire live rounds on a daily basis, was crumbling, and international support for the broader sanctions regime was falling apart as well. Oil-For-Food was in fact established precisely because the sanctions regime had come to be seen as harming Iraqi children while doing little to dent Saddam’s ambitions. Since the mid-1990s the left had begun to call for an end to sanctions regime entirely, irrespective of Saddam’s lack of compliance with them.

So against all of this history and backdrop, we invaded. We had three major reasons to invade–Saddam’s violation of a raft of UN sanctions against him, the violation of which were in and of themselves causes to resume the 1991 Gulf War whether he had caches of WMD or not; Saddam’s dismal human rights record; and his long-standing support for terrorists of global reach, including Abus Abbas and Nidal as well as the Arafat terrorist regime in the Palestinian Authority. Additionally, based on intelligence it was reasonable to believe that Saddam could become an imminent threat if he got his hands on working WMD–not that he already was in imminent threat, but that left to his own devices and with the UN sanctions regime falling apart, he could become one. The left has argued–in complete bad faith–that President Bush said Saddam already was an imminent threat, then used the lack of major WMD stashes to somehow “prove” that Bush was lying about the whole thing. There is lying going on, it’s just not being done by the Bush administration.

Given the nature of WMD and Saddam’s relationships to various terrorists who wanted to attack the US, allowing him to continue in power was unacceptable. The Bush administration and most of its supporters also believed that turning Iraq from a tyranny to a democracy could over time change the nature of politics in the Middle East, tyranny being one of the key ingredients in drawing willing young men to the terrorist cause, and also being the one thing common to pretty much every Islamic government in the region. So we toppled Saddam.

So how are we doing? On the ground in Iraq, things are tough to understand on a micro level, as terrorist attacks come in waves of increase and decrease, and as the various factions iron out the body of law that will govern them. That’s going to take some time, and won’t be an instant success. But on a macro level, the Syrians are out of Lebanon, the Saudis are finally serious about destroying al Qaeda (which is a mostly Saudi creature), the Egyptians are having open elections and the Israelis are getting themselves out of the Gaza trap. To the degree that it’s possible to discern which way the wind is blowing in the Middle East, it seems to be blowing in a way that works for us–more freedom, less tyranny, which means less support for terrorism and a recognition by a growing number of Arab states that repression is a terrible and counterproductive way to govern. There are still major problems to be sure, Tehran’s nuclear ambitions being the most pressing and threatening, but the direction of movement seems to be in our favor nearly everywhere outside of Iran. Which, incidentally, still supports terrorists who can and want to attack us both in Iraq and right here in the US.

With all that in mind, to win the war in any meaningful sense requires not only winning battles on the ground but in hearts and minds. And Michael Barone finds evidence that we’re doing fairly well there, too:

But the most important changes occurring, not just in Iraq but across the Muslim world, are changes in people’s minds. These are harder, but not impossible, to measure. George W. Bush has proclaimed that we are working to build democracy in Iraq not just for Iraqis but in order to advance freedom and defeat fanatical Islamist terrorism around the world. Now comes the Pew Global Attitudes Project’s recent survey of opinion in six Muslim countries to tell us that progress is being made in achieving that goal. Minds are being changed and in the right direction.

Most important, support for terrorism in defense of Islam has “declined dramatically,” in the Pew report’s words, in Muslim countries, except in Jordan (which has a Palestinian majority) and Turkey, where support has remained a low 14 percent. It has fallen in Indonesia (from 27 to 15 percent since 2002), Pakistan (from 41 to 25 percent since 2004), Morocco (from 40 to 13 percent since 2004), and among Muslims in Lebanon (from 73 to 26 percent since 2002). Support for suicide bombings against Americans in Iraq has also declined. The percentage reporting some confidence in Osama bin Laden is now under 10 percent in Lebanon and Turkey and has fallen sharply in Indonesia.

Similarly, when asked whether democracy was a western way of doing things or could work well in their own country, between 77 and 83 percent in Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, and Indonesia say it could work in their country–in each case a significant increase from earlier surveys. In Turkey, with its sharp political divisions, and Pakistan, with its checkered history, the percentages hover around 50 percent.

This is tremendous news. A real question that has hovered over our entire Iraq enterprise centers on whether Islam, even the non-caliphascist variety, is even compatible with democracy at all. That’s not an idle question; republicanism only arose in the West after long exposure to and experimentation with Christian thinking and its emphasis on the value of the individual soul. It took us several centuries to get to the American experiment, centuries which saw the “divine right of kings” and sectarian warfare. Islam it’s fair to say lacks the same set of ideals regarding the individual, and doesn’t have for its prime example a figure nearly as complex as Christ, who eschewed secular power and never once preached converting anyone to his banner via the sword. Mohammed may or may not have been a prophet, but he was definitely an earthly warlord whose powers of persuasion were enhanced by martial thinking. He would not and did not volunteer to suffer for anyone else’s sake, and thus provides no example for loving one’s neighbor selflessly. The two examples for religious leadership–Christ and Mohammed–couldn’t be more different, therefore it’s reasonable to believe that their faiths would take followers down different moral and political paths. But if a majority of Muslims now think democracy is compatible with their faith, and if we have given them the spark they needed to demand the right to try democracy, then we have gone a long way toward winning the war.

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