We need to keep in view the recovery of the Iraqi economy since liberation. The Iraqi Ministry of Finance estimates that the economy is growing at 17 per cent this year. Unemployment has dropped by as much as 50 per cent, with per capita income rising from less than $US700 at the liberation to a projected $US1200 in 2007. Iraq's schools are educating 4.3 million children. Teacher pay has been raised by up to 2500 per cent over pre-war levels.
An independent media has been born: there are 23 commercial television stations, 80 radio stations, 170 newspapers and magazines. Iraq's environment is returning to life, as US engineers blow up the dikes that drained and poisoned the marshes of southern Iraq and allow the Marsh Arabs to return to their ancient homes.
And what of the terrorists, who are trying to take all this away?
More fatefully for the terrorists, their tactics, horrendous as they may be in the short run are over the longer term turning Arab and Muslim opinion against the extremist versions of Islam that sanction such tactics.
After a group of 26 Saudi imams issued a communique in November 2004 urging jihad in Iraq, a columnist in an official Saudi daily reflected the emerging conventional wisdom in the Middle East:
"Instead of adding fuel to the fire in Iraq, these 26 clerics should have made clear the sharia's stand concerning a jihad of beheadings, the kidnapping of innocent [people], and blowing up booby-trapped cars and roadside bombs against pedestrians - children, women, and the elderly. What is going on today in Iraq is madness that feeds every day on the lives of innocent Iraqis and quenches its thirst with the forbidden blood that flows mercilessly through the streets of Iraq."
We're winning, they're losing.
All we need is patience.