The Washington Post editors write:

Rarely in the contemporary world has a domestic insurgency been as decisively crushed by military means as the Tamil Tiger rebels of Sri Lanka have been — and arguably not in recent times has a reversal of fortunes been so dramatic.

Hmm, let’s think for a minute. Any great military counter-insurgency efforts in recent memory, any remarkable ones which defied the odds? Why there is that whole Iraq thing — you remember, right? Funny how the Post editors seem to have amnesia about one of the greatest (if not the greatest) counterinsurgency operations in American history.

But that, I fear, is how Iraq War will come to be portrayed: bad intelligence, followed by a mistaken strategy that was then fixed so we could leave. Left out of course is a remarkable tale. The President realized that we were losing a war, that the strategy of handing the baton over to Iraqi Security Forces as quickly as possible and leaving the insurgency to them was flawed and that we couldn’t somehow evade the necessity of providing security to the Iraqi people. The construction and implementation of a winning counter-insurgency strategy is one of the great accomplishments in our military history. But, in large part, because that strategy was so resisted by the current administration and the media elites, it has already slipped down the collective memory hole.

The defeat of the Tamil Tigers is a wonderful accomplishment, but the Post editors should be ashamed for so obviously and insultingly suggesting there is no recent achievement of equal or greater merit.