Boy, I sure could go for some insight into the current state of the U.S. presidential election:

So what is the reason for McCain's surge? Basically, it's due to the success of Bush's Iraq surge. Despite the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm election, losses that were attributed to an unpopular war, Bush responded not by giving in to his critics but by escalating the war. He sent in another 20,000 troops.

That's an interesting account of what happened in late 2006. Another, more accurate account would probably include a mention of the fact that President Bush did indeed give in to his critics on both the left and the right by sacking his unpopular Secretary of Defense on the day after the election, and then continued to give in to his critics on the right by finally conceding that "[i]t is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq" by sending in more troops, a move which those critics had been calling for since the very beginning and which Bush had previously dismissed as unnecessary.

Remember Gentral "Betray Us"? This was the epithet devised by the leftist group Moveon.org in an attempt to discredit Petraeus.

I actually do remember that one New York Times ad from a few months ago, just as I remember this from a few hours ago.

While Petraeus was cautious in his predictions, the results are better than could have been reasonably hoped.

"Reasonably" here makes for a good qualifier; in hindsight, Bush's own hopes don't quite make the cut. From the "surge speech" he gave more than a year ago:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

Back to D'Souza, who has more political wisdom to impart:

Now that Bush's Iraq policy is working, the media pundits are proclaiming Iraq a "secondary issue." Now they want to talk about the stock market and the housing crisis. But the American people aren't dumb. They know the Iraq war and America's battle against Islamic radicalism remains central.