Victory in Anbar

Wouldn't it have been fun to be a fly on the wall when the members of the editorial board of the New York Times picked up the paper's Sunday edition and discovered the dispatch by its celebrated war correspondent, Michael Gordon, on the success of the surge. Mr. Gordon's report focused on the doubt and debate in which the decision to back a surge and fight strategy was decided on by the president, and it's clear that the doubts and debate were substantial.

There were Republicans like Senator Warner and Democrats like Senator Biden. There was a new generation of anti-war activists on the Internet and the august panel of former statesman on the Iraq Study Group. And there was of course the New York Times, who on January 11, 2007 — the day after President Bush announced the new strategy — published an editorial called, "The Real Disaster." Mr. Gordon's dispatch, for understandable reasons, didn't get into the judgment of the Times itself, though the editorial had declared Mr. Bush's new strategy was a "way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one."

The Times grumbled at the time that "Talk of a 'surge' ignores the other 132,000 American troops trapped by a failed strategy." Mr. Gordon discloses that what amounts to the Times view of things was, in the fall of 2006, shared by a number of powerful figures within the administration, including Ambassador Khalilzad, General George Casey, and Secretary Rumsfeld. It turns out that the strategy that has proved so successful had few backers inside the government. They included General Petraeus and his deputy, General Odierno. The real vision came from the one man whose opinion counted, President Bush.

Historians will look back at those dark months at the end of 2006 as an extraordinary test for this, or any, president. In 2006, one could not open an American magazine or newspaper without reading about Mr. Bush's bubble and how he famously could not remember a single mistake from his presidency. Salons from Manhattan to Georgetown chattered endlessly about the imperial presidency of George W. Bush. It turns out, however, that the elites were trapped in a bubble of their own making.

This is something to think about this week, as the announcement comes that Anbar province is the latest to be turned over to Iraqi control, a signal of victory. The parliamentarian Mithal al Alusi and the Sheiks of Anbar understood that America had an obligation to weigh in on the side of Iraq, and against those forces, like the Ba'ath party, Al Qaeda, Iran, and Syria, who sought to destroy Iraq with their truck bombs and death squads. It is what Senator McCain understood and defended on the floor of the Senate against the better judgment a Democratic leadership that was declaring America had lost.