This is good news:

Iraq’s new prime minister announced an agreement Monday by nine political parties to dissolve their militias, integrating some of the estimated 102,000 fighters into the army and police and pensioning off the rest to firm up government control ahead of the transfer of sovereignty.

Although the days leading up to Iraqi sovereignty may witness greater violence as terrorists try to dislodge the transitional government, things are looking a lot better than they did just two months ago when Fallujah erupted and Moqtada al-Sadr still looked relevant.

Brendan Miniter of The Wall Street Journal describes how the U.S. Marines are pacifying Fallujah:

As they were battling through the city two months ago, the Marines realized they could easily crush the insurgency in Fallujah but in the process would “rubble the city.” That would leave thousands of Marines patrolling the city, repairing infrastructure and trying to build working relationships with the inhabitants who remained. “That doesn’t work us out of a job,” Col. Coleman told me. Nor would it leave the Marines free to conduct other operations.

What they needed to do was drive wedges into the enemy ranks—divide and conquer.

Miniter then discusses exactly how, with local help, the Marines succeeded.

These are the stories that the broadcast media tends to ignore, but they show that far from being another Vietnam, Iraq might actually be closer to Germany after World War II. If you think that sounds naively optimistic, it’s probably because you don’t know how the media covered post-war Europe. In 1946, Life Magazine reported:

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.

You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last war America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now.

Never has American prestige in Europe been lower.

The media’s version of history is often wrong the first time they try to write it. Just look at how Ronald Reagan was covered when he left office compared to now. His greatness, denied then, seems self-evident more than a decade beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the short run, the truth can be denied, but it never stays suppressed forever.