One of the questions in the presidential race is what Senator Obama is going to make of his visit to Iraq. The senator announced Monday that he is going back to the theater. What he is going to see is different than the alleged wreckage he and his party have been bemoaning. It’s going to be no small moment in the presidential race, and the quarter most nervous about it is no doubt the anti-war faction.

In August, when Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat who opposed invasion, saw the war for himself, he crossed the protesters and changed his mind. Returning from the front, Mr. Baird declared: “I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better.” Such honesty earned a flurry of MoveOn.org-sponsored television ads urging him to change his mind back to his original position.

The occasion for Mr. Obama’s decision to visit Iraq was a phone call with the country’s foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari. At a campaign stop in Flint, Mich., the presumptive Democratic nominee said: “I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making it clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq.”

In Baghdad, Mr. Obama will get a chance to meet with Ambassador Crocker, who is leading negotiations with the Iraqi government on the presence of American troops. Mr. Crocker will likely tell the senator that our position is not to keep bases permanently but to lease them for 10 years from the Iraqi government, whose lawmakers, he’ll report, privately hope the bases will be used as barracks for our GIs.

The phrase “permanent bases” is a partisan fiction that belongs in the dustbin of anti-war nonsense along with all those “Bush lied, who died?” bumper stickers. It would not be surprising were the senator’s opposition to those “permanent bases” to go the same way as his opposition to designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, a position he endorsed at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to the consternation of his left flank.

If Mr. Obama helicopters out of Baghdad to see Anbar, Basra, and Mosul, he will gain other insights. In Anbar, he would have an opportunity to meet with Sheik Ahmad al-Rishawi, leader of the fight against Al Qaeda there; when the sheik was in Chicago, the Obama campaign sent staffers, but the candidate could not make the meeting. In Anbar Mr. Obama would also have a chance to review video footage the rebels have captured from Al Qaeda headquarters that document public executions and other acts of Khmer Rouge-level cruelties Osama bin Laden’s thugs imposed on the Iraqis.

In Basra, Mr. Obama would be able to survey the success of the Iraqi army’s campaign in April against Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. At the time, some press reports had it that the operation was a failure and showed the impotence of Iraq’s new military. Subsequent reports from Iraq’s secondlargest city disclose that the area is now under control of the state and not the outlaws.

In Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, Mr. Obama would be able to see the latest example of how Iraqis, with the aid of American arms, are taking back their neighborhoods from Al Qaeda. Last month, Agence France-Presse reported that a local bread known as Sammoun was back on the shelves of markets. Al Qaeda had banned the sale of the bread because it claimed the recipe did not exist in the Koran. The punishment for such offenses as selling Sammoun or placing cucumbers and tomatoes in the same display was corporal and at times lethal.

* * *

There are all kinds of courage in war, and not the least of them is the kind exhibited by a senator who has been a fierce critic of our strategy but who nonetheless makes his way to the front and listens to what our GIs and their generals have to report. Our own sense of what is happening in Iraq is that the success of the surge is more complete than even its supporters had imagined, which, given how much doubting there was in the Bush administration itself at the time of the surge, speaks volumes about the vision of the most ardent backer of the surge, President Bush. The only danger to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign from his bringing back an honest report of this success will be from his left flank.