No sooner had the Iraqi Army liberated Mosul from the clutches of the Islamic State terrorists than American journalists were rushing to find a way to rain on the parade.
"It is far too soon to celebrate," wrote the New Yorker's Robin Wright, who is a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
"The government's costly victory in Mosul and the questions hanging over its aftermath feel more like the next chapter in the long story of Iraq's unraveling," Tim Arango wrote in a front-page New York Times news article, leaving unspecified whose feelings, exactly, other than his own, were being described.
Realism in the face of what looks like progress in Iraq is surely warranted, as experience shows. But the journalistic caution itself runs the risk of missing what is potentially a landmark victory, not only in the war against ISIS, but in the struggle —perhaps even more important in the long run — to restore the faith of the American people in the project of advancing democracy and freedom abroad.
That endeavor, alas, has lately seemed to be discredited among both Republicans and Democrats, with the largest degree of blame resting on what seemed like a failure in Iraq. Images of carnage and American combat casualties overtook those of initial successes such as the capture of Saddam Hussein and the inked thumbprints of the voters who participated in the first post-Saddam election. The American public concluded it hadn't been worth the trouble.
In 2016, the Republican president candidate, Donald Trump, called the war in Iraq "a big fat mistake," and the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, said her vote as a senator to authorize the war also had been a mistake. President Obama had been elected in 2008 in part because he opposed the war.
The victory in Mosul has the potential to rewrite the narrative in a more positive way. It's right up there with the capture of Saddam and the ecstasy of the postwar Iraqi election in terms of achievements that are really formidable. Consider that an independent, democratically elected, mostly Arab government took the lead in a militarily decisive, and successful, campaign against an evil terrorist organization. When has that ever happened before?
Now, one might argue, as many do, that without the Iraq War or the ouster of Saddam, the campaign against ISIS would never have even been necessary, because the group wouldn't have emerged to fill the power vacuum created in post-Saddam Iraq after the withdrawal of American troops. That ignores that the Islamic State also holds territory in Syria, where America more or less acquiesced in allowing the regnant dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to keep power.
The Mosul win demonstrates that America can fight terrorists abroad with military strategies that stop short of a full-scale, Iraq War-style ground invasion. American air support, training, equipment, and the involvement of special forces helped make victory possible. But so did the George W. Bush-era policy of creating a free and democratic, moderate and pluralistic Iraq that Iraqis themselves would be willing to fight fiercely to the death to defend.
If those Iraqi troops had not won victory in Mosul after months of what has been described as some of the most difficult door-to-door, house-to-house combat since Stalingrad, the battle against ISIS would have to have been fought somewhere else — perhaps in Europe or even in America, where the group has already inspired deadly attacks.
Clinton and Trump, and Americans in general, are right to be wary of overseas adventures. They can be costly in terms of lives and dollars. But they sometimes bring rewards as well. The victory in Mosul is one. It deserves to be celebrated. And it deserves to be remembered as an example of what is possible when America chooses to advance its ideals and interests abroad rather than retreat.