In today’s Democrat & Chronicle is a column by George Will that was printed in larger papers yesterday. I read it and my jaw dropped. When did George Will become Andrew Sullivan?

Before Gen. David Petraeus’s report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq’s Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president’s and Petraeus’s standards of success.

The President has visited Baghdad several times. How is the success of the surge measured by his visit to Anbar rather than to Baghdad? Anbar is a success story and a place that both Iraqis and Americans can take a certain pride in have changed for the better. Baghdad itself is improving and is a far better place than it was six months ago. Yet, in these simple sentences Will somehow concludes that a visit to highlight a success story means the surge has failed.

Will goes on to say

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time — “breathing space,” the president says — for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Will characterizes Iraqi society as

a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds.

As a historian, Will certainly recognizes that all nations are born with a degree of chaos. Our own United States was “a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds” for generations, not just a handful of years. Just hours ago the Mormon Church released an expression of “profound regret” for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1847. We cannot forget our Civil War a few years later. In the 1920’s more than one black community could attest to the existence of “a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds”.

Measuring Iraqi political reconciliation goes beyond the legislative efforts of the Iraqi national government. It is visible at the local and provincial levels. It is visible in the military and police. It is visible in the lack of a civil war despite all of the outside interference attempting to provoke one.

Will then uses some incorrect statements to bolster his argument.

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. This homogenization of hostile factions — trained and armed by U.S. forces — may bear poisonous fruit in a full-blown civil war.

Multi-National Force-Iraq corrects the Post and Mr. Will:

Multi-National Force-Iraq defines ethno-sectarian murder as a murder committed by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

Ethno-sectarian violence is defined as an event and any associated civilian deaths caused by or during murders/executions, kidnappings, direct fire, indirect fire, and all types of explosive devices identified as being conducted by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

In our collection of data, a shot to the front or back of the head is not used to determine ethno-sectarian murder.

The number of ethno-sectarian murders has declined significantly since the height of the sectarian violence in December 2006.

Iraq-wide, the number of ethno-sectarian deaths has decreased by over 55 percent, and it would have decreased much further if it not for the casualties inflicted by barbaric al-Qaeda bombings attempting to reignite sectarian violence.

As for the accusation that sectarian forces are “trained and armed by U.S. forces”. Nonsense! This is merely the echoing of false statements made by the anti-war left. Will has no evidence that this is the case nor does the left.

As one milblogger pointed out, we have no need to arm anyone in Iraq with the vast amounts of arms that Saddam had purchased and stored before our liberation of that nation. Every household in Iraq is entitled to have an AK-47 for self-protection and most seem to have availed themselves of that right.

Will concludes with a repetition of the left’s claim that “the “gathering danger” of weapons of mass destruction — was fictitious” and writes

That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president’s decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war — the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

1n 1780, four years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States was still involved in a war for its independence. One of our foremost generals defected to the British in that year and American militias opposing independence ravaged much of the south. In the following year, we adopted a new form of government, and eight years later we adopted a different form of government. Over 100,000 Americans fled the independent United States, many in fear for their lives. Democracy is hard and we should be very careful in holding the Iraqis to a schedule we were unable to meet.

As to the questions he closes with “Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?”, I would suggest that the tens of millions of Iraqi citizens who have voted three times so far would put paid to that scurrilous canard. The thousands of Iraqis in the military and police who have died in the line of duty put paid to that scurrilous canard. And, sadly, the American dead such as Paul Smith, Jason Dunham, Amanda Pinson and Terrence Crowe, who died in the line of duty in this war, put paid to that scurrilous canard. Because, Mr. Will, if there is no Iraq and no nation that calls itself Iraqi, then all these heroes have died in vain.