Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham went to Iraq this past week and found… progress. What a reassuring report from two of the most stalwart Senators, who earnestly support Mr Bu$h’s intransigence and inability to ever admit error!

WASHINGTON – Sen. Lindsey Graham has returned from his seventh wartime visit to Iraq with renewed hope that the U.S. troop buildup is producing results.

At the same time, the South Carolina Republican told Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders that they’ve made too little progress on steps such as reconciling the country’s warring factions and sharing oil revenues among Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds.

OK, so Senator Graham only expressed “hope” and not “unbounded confidence” or “insane resolution,” but the principle is about the same. Senator Graham is a Class II senator. His term ends in January, 2009, but coming from South Carolina I suppose he feels fireproof, or maybe he just likes the rug bargains in Baghdad.

You can be certain that Senator Graham emphasized the “oil sharing” meme with Prim Minster Maliki. That’s the code word for “hand over your oil resources to Mr Cheney’s friends.”

“The military part of the surge is working beyond my expectations,” Graham said. “We literally have the enemy on the run. The Sunni part of Iraq has really rejected al-Qaida all over the country. We’re getting more information about al-Qaida operations than we’ve ever received.”

If the “military part” of the surge entails chasing insurgents, Ba’athists, dead enders and Iraq Army elements from one city to the next, I’d agree. During the recent “big push” in the environs of Baquba, more than 80% of the resistance skied off days before the operation began. Like their patrons in the Bu$h malAdministration, Generals Petraeus, Odierno and Bergner feel compelled to produce confident “good news” press releases on a daily basis.

Senator McCain, by the way, agrees with his colleague from South Carolina, since his faltering Presidential campaign is still alive, although now on a resuscitator.

Senator Joe Lieberman (R-Tel Aviv) also thinks the surge escalation is working.

"We've got to think not about the next election but the next generation," he told a Capitol Hill news conference. The U.S. military surge, Lieberman contended, has the enemy "on the run."

However, here on the Planet Earth, events disagree with these three fantasists:

Security developments in Iraq on Saturday, July 7, 2007:

Iraqis reported killed: 194. Iraqis reported wounded: 300.

U.S. troops reported killed: 3. U.S. troops reported wounded: 5.

British troops reported killed: 2. British troops reported wounded: 3.

TUZ KHURMATO - A suicide truck bomb killed at least 150 people and wounded 250 at a busy outdoor market in the Shi’ite Turkmen village of Amerli south of of Tuz Khurmato (200 km north east of Baghdad) on Saturday morning, police said, according to Reuters and AP. Over 30 houses and 20 shops were leveled in the massive blast, and the wounded had to be transported to hospitals in Tikrit and Kirkuk because the Tuz Khurmatu hospital was understaffed, contributing to the rising death toll. Five people were still missing and unaccounted for, according to VOI [Voices of Iraq]. The sectarian and ethnically mixed Tuz region, sandwiched between Kirkuk and Baquba, had recently witnessed increased, deadly activity of Islamic State of Iraq militants, who were possibly on the run from military operations in Baquba and Baghdad. [emph added]

Destroying an entire village is a big step for the insurgents, or resistance, or al Qaeda, or whatever you want to call them. An attack like that used to be the sole province of the US Air Force.

Progress. I love the smell of progress in the morning. It smells like…death.