DECLARING DEFEAT

We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our material resources have been squandered, our best people killed, and our reputation around the world is circling the drain.  We must withdraw immediately.

No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe.

Al Qaeda had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein.  But once he was toppled, Al Qaeda's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan. 

"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audio tape posted on Islamic Web sites in December, 2004.  "It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers.  The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."

Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq from all over the Moslem world.  All for naught.  Al Qaeda has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Major General Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7.  This follows the expulsion of Al Qaeda from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.

Al Qaeda is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit.

Al Qaeda's support in the Moslem world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because Al Qaeda's attacks have mostly killed Moslem civilians.

"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many Al Qaeda operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," says StrategyPage.

Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing Al Qaeda to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq.  The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. 

It may have been a mistake for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq.  But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for Al Qaeda to have done so.

You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen Al Qaeda, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.

"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," says Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"

Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today.  Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.  When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. 

But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of the Washington Post, and not mentioned at all in the New York Times. 

"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said.  "While some students said yes…most attributed the decision to poor news judgment.  They were being generous."

Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."

Rich Lowry agrees.  "The United States may be the only country in world history than reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.

If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained the AP's Robert Reid to write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable."  It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run Mr. Reid's story, and where in the paper they place it.

"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make believe version," says the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq.