The war is over, and we won.(postware reconstruction in Iraq)

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another period of embedded reporting. Compared to my earlier tours during 2003 and 2004, I could immediately see improvements. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.

The Iraqis themselves are encouraged. In a nationwide scientific poll in late April, 67 percent said "Iraq today is generally headed in the right direction;" 20 percent answered "wrong direction." Asked whether "security" has grown better, worse, or the same in recent months, 67 percent of Iraqis said "better."

The U.S. soldiers I was with observed the same things. Many of them had an earlier deployment in Iraq during 2003, and these almost universally talked about how much change they could see over their two tours: progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.

I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad's worst slums, on the city's north edge.

I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring--something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where U.S. tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving road ting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, having trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq is over as warfare. Egregious acts of terror will continue--in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this guerilla war to an insurgency ...