If you still need more evidence that the situation in Iraq has improved, you should read this story. A lot of areas in Iraq have settled down so much that some soldiers feel like there missing all the action in Afghanistan.

Spc. Grover Gebhart has spent nine months at a small post on a Sunni-Shiite fault line in western Baghdad. But the 21-year-old soldier on his first tour in Iraq feels he’s missing the real war—in Afghanistan, where his brother is fighting the Taliban.

With violence in Iraq at its lowest level in four years and the war in Afghanistan at a peak, the soldiers serving at patrol station Maverick say Gebhart’s view is increasingly common, especially among younger soldiers looking to prove themselves in battle.

The part of the story that’s guaranteed to drive left-wing war crtics completely nuts is this:

Instead of facing gunfire and roadside bombs, the soldiers’ armored Humvees are chased by waving children as they weave through streets crowded with pedestrians out to shop or just to stroll.

Ouch, that could really damage the “surge didn’t work” narrative of the far-left.