Surveying the Iraq debate here, it’s understandable if the average voter is confused. Heck, it seems as if even the presidential candidates are confused. Just as Senator Obama appeared to be walking back his primary season embrace of retreat, he gives a speech this week affirming his old 16-month deadline for withdrawal. Just as Iraq’s American trained army wins four straight battles, Prime Minister Maliki publicly calls for the Yanks to go home. And just after President Bush replaced the Centcom commander who sought to deplete forces in Iraq to send them to Afghanistan, the Pentagon appears to be doing just that. Even the steadfast Senator McCain now says he wants to send three brigades to the Afghan front, anticipating he will draw from the pool of troops returning home from Iraq.

So what is the source of all this confusion? One word: victory. America won, and Al Qaeda, the Ba’athists, and the Iranians lost. Nineteen months ago, when President Bush announced his new strategy for Iraq, very few people predicted that General Petraeus and our military would prevent what appeared to be a certain civil war, or guessed that our Marines and GIs in Anbar would find tribal sheiks who would displace Al Qaeda from their fiefdom in western Iraq. Now provincial elections for this year and federal ones for 2009 are on schedule. Today the Iraqi military, which two years ago was corrupt and infiltrated with terrorists, wins battles in Basra against Shiite criminal gangs affiliated with Moqtada al Sadr. There is a joke going around Basra that the Iraqi military is willing to offer training to the British forces who abandoned that fight in 2006.

The Iraqi government has met all but two of the political benchmarks Democrats trumpeted as proof of defeat six months ago. The casualty statistics for Iraq are now in the range of the first months of the war. Michael Yon, one of the best war reporters of his generation, on Tuesday put it thus: “A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.” Even National Public Radio was reporting this week that the levels of violence in Iraq were the lowest they have been in four years.

These facts have changed the war Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Reid said was lost more than a year ago. They have also opened up military options for other fronts that did not exist when Iraq was on the precipice of disaster. Now the next president will not have to choose between Afghanistan, a front we are now losing as evidence by the daring Taliban raid this month on an American forward operating base, and Iraq.

Democrats, who have tried to frame the Iraq debate as one over troop levels and troop casualties, will see the coming draw downs in that theater as a political victory. But this is a half truth. The distinction between the two parties, and for that matter the two candidates on the Iraq debate, is that one of them sought to betray Iraq when most of its territory was controlled by Islamic supremacist gangs, while the other saw it as America’s strategic and moral obligation to beat back those parties who deliberately sought a civil war. When President Bush and Senator McCain tried to prevent what Democrats said was inevitable defeat, the Democrats accused them of prolonging the war. Now that the surge strategy has succeeded so much that Senator Obama has removed language criticizing the strategy on his Web site, the Democrats seek to claim a political victory made possible by the military one they tried so hard to prevent.