Let's see another day another lie...

January 20, 2008, Fred "Gordita-Warrior" Kagan:

Iraq's parliament this month passed a new de-Baathification bill, which awaits only expected approval by the five-member presidency council before becoming law. Much remains to be done, but this is an important step toward political reconciliation...

January 31, 2008, reality:

Iraq's Presidency Council is unlikely to ratify a new law that would give thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party their old jobs back, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi said on Thursday.

The step would be a blow to Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the United States, which praised the law's approval on January 12 and called it a key step to advancing national reconciliation...

"We cannot regard this law as a step in the national reconciliation process. The spirit of revenge is so clear in many articles of the law," Hashemi said in an interview.

Ah, the Kagans, another family where the sons become military experts, not by serving in the military, but through osmosis. Somebody should write a modern Song of Roland about them [subtle blogwhoring, classy no?].

And, of course, the surge has worked brilliantly sayeth the Kagans, Kagan related byproducts, Kagan-flavor enhanced viscous fluids and, of course, John "Straight Talking" McCain. So clearly, this must be TOTALLY UNTRUE!

The Sunni insurgency, all but decimated in the imagination of the surge advocates, has demonstrated something of a surge of its own in recent weeks. Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala provinces, the hotbeds of the insurgency, have seen a return of high-profile suicide bombing. Prominent collaborators with the U.S., like the so-called "Concerned Local Citizens" militias, have been targeted for death by insurgents and terrorists. "Of late, though, as you’ve been seeing, is certainly an increase in the number of suicide events that occur with individuals, mostly with a suicide vest wrapped around their waist," Adm. Greg Smith, a spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq, said in a blogger conference call last week.

Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent, tell the tale. In Baghdad, improvised-explosive device (IED) detonations explosions in Baghdad have ticked up slightly to 131 in January from 129 in December—and the last week of January is not included in these latest figures. Countrywide, there was an increase in IED explosions to 2,291 in December from 1,394 in November, followed by a dip to 1,270 in the first three weeks of January. But the week ending on January 25 saw seven suicide explosions Iraq-wide, the most since the week ending Dec. 21, 2007.

And then, the latest cannot possibly be true news today:

A female suicide bomber blew herself up at the main pet market in central Baghdad, killing at least 43 people and wounding 78 in the deadliest bombing to strike the capital since 30,000 more American troops began flooding into central Iraq last spring, police said.

About 20 minutes later, a second bomb tore through another bird market in a predominantly Shiite area in southeastern Baghdad. That blast killed at least eight people and wounded 14, police said.

Boy, those terrorists sure hate pets. They should be running in the GOP primaries or something more constructive. If I was Jonah Goldberg there would be a book about this strained and sick analogy nine years in the making (includes the ten minutes of research).