WASHINGTON — As Senate Democrats debated through the night the merits of leaving Iraq, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the security atmosphere in Iraq has undergone a “sea change.”

General Peter Pace brought along a reporter for the Associated Press, Robert Burns, on an unscheduled tour of Ramadi yesterday while his helicopter was grounded in a sandstorm and said he was optimistic that the troop surge that began in February and was completed in June was improving security for Iraqis.

After meeting with the mayor of Ramadi and local shopkeepers, General Pace said: “To them, the hard work of getting rid of Al Qaeda is done. Now they want to get on with their lives,” the AP reported. Mayor Latif Eyada said locals are now volunteering for the police force, but he said the central government has been slow to provide money to rebuild the city, according to the wire service.

The optimism from General Pace appears to be at odds with last week’s strategic assessment of Iraq’s progress toward political and security benchmarks, which found that less than half of the goals have been adequately achieved. While both the Iraqi government and the American military report that sectarian killings have decreased since the beginning of the surge, Al Qaeda has been able to stage spectacular and bloody attacks in Baghdad nonetheless, including a strike on the American-fortified Green Zone in April.

General Pace said that in September, he would provide President Bush with recommendations on a future course for Iraq. Those proposals will be separate from the two reports that the top American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is preparing to present to Congress in September.

“What I’m hearing right now is a sea change that’s taken place in many places here, that it’s no longer a matter of pushing Al Qaeda out of Ramadi, for example, but rather, now that they have been pushed out, helping the local police and local army have a chance to get their feet on the ground,” General Pace said, according to the AP.

Generals Petraeus and Pace have pointed to the success of a regional council of sheiks in Anbar province, known as Anbar Salvation or Anbar Awakening. Reaching out to the Sunni sheiks there and enlisting them in the fight against Al Qaeda appears to be a key component of the national strategy and is being emulated throughout the country.

Some of the new Sunni fighters in the alliance against Al Qaeda are former terrorists, including members of the 1920s Brigade, a largely Baathist organization that was threatened in 2006 by Al Qaeda in Iraq’s push to consolidate the Sunni insurgency.

Senate Democrats yesterday showed no sign that they shared General Pace’s optimism, pushing for and ultimately losing a procedural contest to vote yea or nay on an amendment to begin withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq this year.

“Once again, we have seen the Republican leadership resort to technical maneuvers to block progress on this crucial amendment,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said in the debate. “It would be one thing for Republicans to vote against this amendment. If they honestly believe that ‘stay the course’ is the right strategy, they have the right to vote ‘no.'”

Others in the Senate counter that the surge strategy adopted in January represents a change of course from the military strategy of 2004–06.

Under the old plan, they say, steps were taken to turn over territory to Iraqi security forces that proved unready for battle and often were infiltrated by sectarian militias and terrorists. Under the new plan, American troops often patrol streets and areas in tandem with Iraqi units, focusing primarily on the protection of the population as opposed to the devolution of authority.

In an opinion piece on National Review Online, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, ridiculed the Democratic plan to spend the evening debating a withdrawal from Iraq. “While Republicans focus on the dangers posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, our long-term national security interests in the Persian Gulf, and the warnings that the United Nations and the Baker-Hamilton Commission are issuing on the potential consequences of withdrawal, Democrats will spend the next 24 hours acting out what their staffers have referred to as a ‘publicity stunt,'” he wrote yesterday.

Democrats including the speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, appeared last night at a press conference on Capitol Hill alongside veteran’s groups and military families in favor of withdrawal to press the case for ending the war.