Conditioned as people have become to endless "quagmire," "when-do-we-pull-out" thinking, many Americans seem to have trouble adjusting even to the possibility that after all this time, operations in Iraq might be paying off.

Success in the war in Iraq? The very idea sounds like rank heresy to most leftists, and most war supporters who talk about it are regarded as deluded fools. That's because this war simply cannot be won, so we need to pull out, and that's all there is to it! Depending on whom you talk to, success is either impossible or undesirable. Or both.

In such a climate, it is understandable that the successes reported by General Petraeus would be downplayed, if not silenced completely. The general public is simply not supposed to be confused by the idea that any form of success might be possible, as it screws with the quagmire narrative.

Glenn Reynolds linked a couple of posts which he intended as supplements to General Petraeus' report. Bill Ardolino has an impressive report from Iraq about Marines helping civilians. Iraqi disgust levels with al Qaeda are at an all time high, and the newer tactics have won considerable support:

Another element of Operation Alljah is the engagement of the "Muktars," local community representatives who arbitrate and advocate for community interests.

"When we got here, there was a sheik's council. But in [the actual city of)] Fallujah, you can't have a sheik's council, because they have [Muktars, who are] like city sheiks. Fallujah is not divided by tribes, like in Ramadi. So when we were doing the sheik's council, we were going nowhere, because the sheiks didn't know the people ... until we started noticing the Muktars. They were like, 'What about us? How come nobody's talking to us?'" explained 5/10 CAG Staff Sergeant Mauricio Piedrahita.

"So we started talking to them. They are like block captains who go back to the Saddam days. He's in charge of a neighborhood. He knows everyone inside that neighborhood. They're official positions appointed by the government. We do contracting for projects through them, because they know who to employ, because they know 'Hey, I'm not gonna employ this guy because he's from another district, he needs to be employed by his own (neighborhood).' So this way we ensure that everyone is getting a fair amount of contracts and the projects and jobs are being distributed around the district."

Engaging Muktars and backing their authority has succeeded where past civil affairs strategies have failed. Projects are now more in line with the needs of the community, and the decentralization of contracting has mitigated serious problems with corruption. During these meetings, the Muktars outline the most pressing infrastructure needs for the district: power (generators), fuel, water and sewage.

Why would anyone expect otherwise?

Similarly, Michael Totten reports enormous progress in Ramadi -- once the most dangerous place in Iraq, and today "perhaps the safest city in all of Iraq outside of Kurdistan."

Here is a graph that I asked Military Intelligence to reproduce for me that shows the dramatic decrease in violence in the Topeka Area of Operations in Northern Ramadi from January 1, 2007, to July 28, 2007.

The graph is for internal use by the Army. It is not intended for public consumption or as propaganda. If it were, what it reveals would be even more dramatic. Most of the tiny number of “attacks” that appear after the middle of May weren’t really even attacks.

“Most of those litle blips represent old IEDs we found that were ineffective,” Captain McGee said. “One was a car bomb by perps who came into Ramadi from outside the city. There was only one other attack against us in our area of operations in July, and it was ineffective. As soon as we came in here to stay the civilians felt free enough to inform on them. Al Qaeda can’t come back now because the locals will report them instantly. Ramadi is a conservative Muslim city, but it’s a completely hostile environment for Islamists.”

The area just north of Ramadi was cleared even before the city itself was.

“On April 7 the entire area of operations [just north of the city] was cleared except for sporadic attacks from twelve people,” Major Lee Peters said. “There was no head to cut off. It was like a hydra. We didn’t win by killing their leaders. We won by eroding their support base. These people hate Al Qaeda much more than they ever hated us.”

The tribes of Anbar are turning their Sahawa al Anbar movement into a formal political party that will run in elections. They also hope to spread it to the rest of Iraq under the name Sahawa al Iraq. It is already taking root in the provinces of Diyala and Salah a Din.

I am so disgustedly unsurprised that I can't believe I'm able to crank out a post (especially after my earlier long essay on manipulative and misleading code language by educrats). I have to say, I'm in 100% agreement with Brendan Loy on his reaction to Michael Totten's report:

"It's the most convincing account I've read of the success we're (finally) having in Iraq, and frankly, I don't understand why the hell it's being left to individual conservative bloggers to write accounts like this. Where is the media? Where is the Bush Administration's vaunted propaganda machine?"

I guess if I could sit the embodiment of Mr. Big Mainstream Media down in a chair and ask him anything, it would be along these lines: Doesn't conducting the war include informing people about its successes as well as its failures? Has success become unfashionable or intolerable?

Beyond that, I have a personal observation about something I think applies to the troops in Iraq. What I think a lot of people are missing is that the more you do something, the more proficient you become at doing that thing. This doesn't require a security clearance or access to special facts to understand. The common thread in both Bill Ardolino's and Michael Totten's posts is that the U.S. troops are seasoned, experienced, and just getting better and better. Battle hardened and tested. And smarter. (Obviously, new and better leadership has not hurt.)

This issue -- which I'll call the "experience issue" for the sake of discussion -- touches on an important aspect of success that I haven't seen discussed much, and it's something I think even the quagmire narrative believers would have to concede. Even if there never is an absolute dramatic event of the sort we'd call a military victory, the military is going to end up being stronger than ever before, and in ways never imagined. It's that way with anything you do, and to illustrate, take this blog. Any blog will do as an example. I'm just totally fed up now, and probably shouldn't be writing at all, yet I can crank out my thoughts in a way that would have been impossible four years ago when I started. Why? For the simple reason that I've been doing this every day for over four years.

To stay with the analogy, let's assume that my blog is a hopeless quagmire. It is. No seriously. Take a look at the stated goal: "END THE CULTURE WAR."

What kind of idiotic "goal" is that? There's no way that the "Culture War" will end, because it consists of human arguments over cultural aspects of people's lives, and there are hundreds of millions of lives being lived in this country alone. For me to imagine that it might end is silly -- and the idea that this blog might "end it" is an exercise in the absurd. So the Culture War is a quagmire, and I'm mired in it hopelessly. Yeah, I suppose I can "withdraw," but even if I do that, I am still changed by the experience. I can write daily posts anywhere I want, about nearly anything. My point being that the experience I gain has nothing to do with winning or losing the Culture War.

Now, I've never been in the military, so I lack combat experience. But I know that experience is experience, and it is unreasonable to expect that anyone who does something for a long time is not going to get better at doing it.

What this means is that if Hillary Clinton gets elected, declares the "long national quagmire" over and pulls the troops out, the military will be left a lot more experienced than they would have been.

And most importantly, they will not have been defeated. Just as you don't defeat a man by silencing him, you don't defeat soldiers by withdrawing them. The successes are theirs, and they cannot be taken away. (Perhaps that's why they're the last to be asked whether they consider themselves to be in a quagmire. After all, opinions of soldiers are of no more value than the opinions of chickenhawks like me.)

What I can't figure out is why people are trying to deny that their successes are successes.

Do they really want them to lose so badly that they have to lie about it?

Maybe so. Anyway, this is getting to be almost as ridiculous as the "peace studies and conflict resolution," "zero tolerance for violence" educational movement. The common thread is that victory is defeat. By the pacifists' logic, then, success is failure.

But the successes in Iraq, grounded as they are in the experience of the troops, answer my earlier question: "How the hell are we supposed to fight a war if we're attacked and all the kids were raised with this nonsense?"

Obviously, the kids will have to learn despite the efforts to raise them with nonsense.

Fortunately, some of them have learned, and they are no longer kids.

MORE: Glenn Reynolds links Mario Loyola, who thinks defeatism is built into the Democratic Party by a sort of Hobson's choice:

I must say that I sympathize with the bind that Democratic leaders are in somewhat. Defeatism is forced upon them by their base. That's why they have no choice but but to insist that Iraq is going disastrously badly, that it was all a mistake, and that we should get out now. Where they have no choice but to acknowledge that progress has been made, they must insist at all costs that President Bush's policies have had nothing to do with it. It is a matter of political reality. Their base will throw them back into the minority if they say anything else.

...young men who in normal times could have been expected to form an officer core were, though the draft deferment system, transformed into a malignantly dishonest force which is now one of the most powerful political forces in the country.

People who have defied the wisdom of the ages by making such a grotesque logical error, are in my view rendered incapable of admitting error at all.

I often think debating such a point of view is a useless exercise in the absurd.

But reading about the troops today reminded me that there's always value in experience.