This time Gen. Petraeus returns to Washington having led one of the most remarkably successful military operations in American history. His antiwar critics, meanwhile, face a crisis of credibility – having confidently predicted the failure of the surge, and been proven decidedly wrong. —Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham writing in "Iraq and Its Costs"

An editorial in the Independent expressed the truth succinctly—

The war's advocates have given credit for a downturn in violence since last summer to the deployment of 30,000 more US troops in Baghdad, the so-called "surge" strategy.

But actually, the relative calm has been the result of a combination of the de facto sectarian partition of the capital and the ceasefire imposed by al-Sadr on his militia. Now that ceasefire is apparently on the verge of breakdown, we see how tenuous the "improvement" in Iraq has been.

The word is leaking out. I was startled recently to see a graphic on CNN that consisted of a downward-pointing arrow representing the reduction of violence in Iraq. Sixty percent of the reduction was attributed to al-Sadr's cease-fire order to his militia.

Tags: news and politics Iraq surge