These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Wall Street Journal
October 20, 2007
Pg.A11

Mr. Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book, “The Iranian Time Bomb,” was recently published by St. Martin’s Press.

URL for the entire Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119283901152765565.html

The entire Op-Ed is also available here on Faster, Please! The weblog of Michael Ledeen