The great Steve Coll in this week's 'New Yorker'

Coll, the former Washington Post reporter, Pulitzer winner for Afghanistan book, author of new book on the Bin Ladens (and mentor to one of my friend's sons), writes, among other wise things: "There is, of course, empirical evidence of declining violence in Iraq, which has coincided with Petraeus’s command. The additional troops he requested have certainly been a factor, but not even Petraeus can say how much of one. At best, during the past year he has helped to piece together a stalemate of heavily armed, bloodstained, conspiracy-minded, ambiguously motivated Iraqi militias. Nobody knows how long this gridlock will hold.

"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."