Surge-tastic!

Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly has some data from the Brookings Institution (home of Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, surge defenders extraordinaire) and finds that, contrary to O'Hanlon and Pollack's recent upbeat assessment in the New York Times, "the news sure doesn't look very good." The numbers are from Brookings' own Iraq Index Project, so Matt Yglesias wonders "how it is that Brookings fellows like Peter Rodman, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack seem so unaware of it."

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports the Joint Chiefs want significant troop cuts in Iraq, Yglesias notes Fred Kagan evaluating his own work on the surge in the Weekly Standard, and Iran invades Iraqi Kurdistan. Back in the White House, President Bush has "stepped up his high-pressure sales job... to stay the course in Iraq." But then again, as a Bush aide told Ron Suskind, people like Kevin Drum and McClatchy reporters and Peter Pace and the Los Angeles Times and Suskind himself — people who criticize the President — are "In what we call the reality-based community," and "that's not the way the world really works anymore.... We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

— Nick Baumann