From our editorial this morning:

On National Review Online this morning, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution writes that virtually every primary source of data he has seen shows a decline in violence: “Depending on which category of violence one emphasizes, and which starting and end points one uses for the comparison, most categories of killings are down 20 to 50 percent since the surge began. This is true for overall civilian fatalities from all causes, for victims of extrajudicial killings (basically reprisal assassinations), for murders, and for the most part for car and truck bombing victims.”
O’Hanlon notes that this still probably brings violence down only to the high levels of 2004–05. When a country is just beginning to step back from the brink of hell, the picture is going to be mixed. What is important is the trajectory. We have made strides toward stabilizing Baghdad, and have achieved remarkable success in Sunni provinces. These gains make it conceivable that we can chase al Qaeda from all of central Iraq. This is a very big deal.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein yesterday dismissed General Petraeus as not an “independent evaluator” of the Iraq war. Everything we’ve heard this year indicates that Petraeus is in fact a cautious and factual evaluator of the surge, but in a sense Feinstein is right — Petraeus is vested in the war, sees it as an important national project, and wants to win. Would that Democrats showed a similar bias.