Critical conversion

John Podhoretz points out that yesterday’s Washington Post article admitting that Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the ropes in Iraq is noteworthy not just for being good news in its own right but for two more subtle reasons as well: First, the US military in Iraq has been much more likely to stress tactical gains than make claims of any strategic victory – and a defeat of AQI would definitely fall in that category. Second, the messengers carrying the word home can scarcely be reckoned to be wide-eyed cheerleaders of Mr. Bush’s Mesopotamian adventure:

(The article) was written by Thomas Ricks and Karen De Young. They are, respectively, the lead military correspondent and the lead foreign-affairs correspondent for The Washington Post – and they have been the most pointedly pessimistic and negative voices among the informed U.S. media on the subject of the war in Iraq.

Both occupy a vaunted position – though not officially opinion writers, they plainly have wide latitude to write “news” stories that openly reflect their own views as much as they do the views of those they quote.

Ricks is the author of “Fiasco,” a powerful and sobering book on the failures of the first two years of the war. De Young’s view of the changing U.S. strategy in Iraq has been relentlessly downbeat.

The fact that the two of them collaborated on an article that accepts the crippling of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as a fact is a significant moment in the coverage of this war. Time has mostly been kind to the skepticism they have expressed, and they are both professionally invested in the notion that the war is a failure.

It therefore means something – something important – that Ricks and De Young would co-author an article about a potential turning point in America’s favor.

There could never have been a military victory for al Qaeda in Iraq, but the terror organization was perilously close to winning the only war that really mattered: The battle over American public opinion. If such respected tribunes of the people as Mr. Ricks and Ms. De Young have had their confidence in the inevitability of our failure shaken – and, given the American spirit, what a perverse formulation that sentence represents – perhaps we have arrived at a tipping point indeed.