Though largely dismissed by the Democratic Left, America’s “surge” policy is paying attractive dividends. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is in retreat, violence is down, and political reconciliation is up.

In a 16-page letter that U.S. soldiers found last October near Baghdad, AQI leader Abu Tariq complained that his 600-man force had dwindled to 20 terrorists.

“We were mistreated, cheated, and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he moaned, as Sunnis swapped AQI for the USA. This shift “created panic, fear, and the unwillingness to fight,” another AQI chief whined in his own missive, discovered in November near Samarra. His network, he wrote, suffered “total collapse.”

Terrorism is collapsing across Iraq. In February 2007, when President Bush ordered 30,000 additional troops into Iraq — as Senator John McCain cheered and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama jeered — only 8 percent of Baghdad’s neighborhoods were rated secure. That number is now 75 percent. In 2006, coalition troops defused 2,662 terrorist weapons caches. In 2007, they neutralized 6,956. Since June, attacks on U.S. soldiers have slid 60 percent. Meanwhile, sectarian violence fell 90 percent from January to December 2007, sparing Iraqi and U.S. lives alike.

“The surge has created space for the Iraqi people, and their political leaders, to start resolving deep-seeded differences” says Pete Hegseth, executive director of Vets for Freedom, America’s largest Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans’ organization. The U.S. Army National Guard infantry captain adds: “In a sense, Iraqis have been ‘re-liberated’ from al-Qaeda. This time, I believe they want their country back for good.”

VFF plans a March 14 – April 9 National Heroes Tour in which decorated Iraq War veterans will spread this good news while traveling to 22 stops by bus, from San Diego to New York City. On April 8, “Vets on the Hill” will bring some 400 VFF members to brief members of Congress on how much Iraq has improved since these former GIs served there and in Afghanistan.

For years, terrorists repeatedly bombed Iraq’s oil pipelines, fouling the ground, forcing inky columns of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and frying the fledgling republic’s oil revenues. Pipelines that the Army Corps of Engineers has shielded, helped push Iraq’s December 2007 daily oil output to 2.475 million barrels — 96 percent of pre-war capacity. This year’s daily production goal is 3 million barrels, or 16 percent above pre-war levels. Last month, the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced that it was speaking with Royal Dutch Petroleum (A.K.A. Shell) and four international companies about investing in Iraq’s petroleum sector, to drag it from the 1970s into the 21st century.

This far-brighter security climate is depriving the Democratic Left of its last anti-surge talking point. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D – California) told CNN February 10, “The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure.”

Either Pelosi is self-deluded, or she spoke prematurely. On February 13, the Iraqi parliament scored a trifecta. It adopted a $48 billion budget, scheduled provincial elections for October 1 within the context of new rules governing central, regional, and local authorities, and passed an amnesty measure that could free thousands of mainly Sunni detainees not accused of serious crimes. Legislators embraced these bills unanimously.

“Today is a wedding for Iraq’s parliament,” said speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani. “We have proved that Iraqis are just one bloc.”

Iraqi lawmakers also recently green-lighted a de-Baathification law that bars some of Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen from public service, but welcomes back many more dismissed functionaries who have clean hands. A new pension law will grant retirement incomes to older ex-Baathists. If it should not buy their love, this should at least buy their peace.

Despite such dramatic security gains and serious political progress, American and allied GIs must stay vigilant. AQI remains deadly and jaw-droppingly brutal. While some on the American Left vilify the Boy Scouts, recently released video tapes show AQI training 10-year-old lads how to kidnap and slaughter people and blow themselves up with suicide vests. Meanwhile, AQI sent two bomb-equipped women with Down’s Syndrome into two Baghdad pet markets on February 1. They exploded these innocent women by remote control, murdering them and 73 other people, wounding 167, and wiping out helpless birds and other animal companions.

This butchery recalled a January 2005 atrocity in which AQI strapped Dynamite to Amar Ahmed Mohammed, a 19-year-old with Down’s Syndrome, and deployed him to mingle among voters. They detonated him to disrupt Election Day.

It is difficult to imagine more barbaric abuse of mentally handicapped human beings since Adolf Hitler used carbon monoxide to exterminate mentally retarded Germans at Wiesbaden’s Hadamar Psychiatric Institute in the early 1940s. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (and their comrades worldwide) must be destroyed, just as were the Nazis. America’s surge is driving them to similar doom.

— Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

© 2008 Scripps Howard News