• More than 70 percent of the cells created by al Qaeda in Iraq have been dismantled, with vast amounts of money and arms seized from terrorists and insurgents. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq, set up by al Qaeda in parts of four provinces, has collapsed.
• Iraqis who'd sought temporary refuge in neighboring countries are returning home in large numbers - 1,000 a day returning from Syria alone.
• Thanks to mediation by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite coalition, the three groups that had withdrawn from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government are expected to return to the fold.
• The British forces' handover of Basra to Iraqi authorities was completed without a hitch; Iraq's second largest city is rapidly returning to normal.


• Iraq's national currency, the dinar, is trading at its highest level since 1990 against the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar.


• Iraqi oil production is at its highest since 2002. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrestani recently notified OPEC that Iraq intends to produce its full quota next year.


• There's a rush of applications to set up small and medium businesses. In Baghdad alone, the figure for October was 400, compared to 80 last August.


• The fourth American university in the Arab world, and the first in Iraq, has started work in Suleymanieh, close to the Iranian border.

Although there is indeed some bad news to go along with the good, Taheri notes that IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances.

Statistics of violence don't begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

What is new is that now more Americans appear willing to acknowledge this - good news in itself. As long as the United States remains resolute in its support for the new Iraq, there will be more good news than bad from what is at present the main battlefield in the War on Terror.

All along the Democrats have done everything possible to hamper the war effort, embolden the Islamists, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As a commenter pointed out at Chicago Sun-Times, "The strategy behind the surge in Iraq is working. Baghdad is coming alive. A turning point appears to have been reached. And what are Democrats in Congress doing? They are calling for the surge to end, that troops be brought home and success curtailed, even as al-Qaida has been halted and civil war has been averted. Can Democrats really be trusted with national security when they tenaciously hold on to a Vietnam mentality?

The answer, of course, is no!

Related: With all the good news now coming out on Iraq, are the Democrats now set for falling into a trap?