Dog and Pony

Get ready, cause here it comes. Despite reality, we're going to enter into the Alice in Wonderland mode this week:

The LAT points out the recent increase in violence will make it difficult for Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to "depict Iraq as moving toward stability" when they testify before Congress this week.

Added: Funny. Guess I'm not the only one who see the Alice comparison. Steven Coll in the New Yorker:

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”) Last week, it proved necessary for the Bush Administration to claim that an obvious failure—Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s ill-prepared raid on rival Shiite gangs in Basra, which was aborted after mass desertions within Maliki’s own ranks—was actually a success in disguise, because it demonstrated the Iraqi government’s independence of mind.

In the meantime, five ten more U.S. soldiers are gone.

Added: A great update post from Needlenose. Apparently the Kurds and Iraqi government are demanding al Sadr disband his militia or be kept out of the political process/elections. That's worked really well with the Sunni's hasn't it. Pretty soon, they'll have alienated a full majority of the population. As Needlenose writes, likely this is coming about after the wake-up call in Basra where Sadr demonstrated the ability to "clean everyone's clock". Sadr has responded that he will disband when the Ayatollah Sistani, who's been rather quiet of late, says to.