And the fool on the hill sees the world going round. . . clicky

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"I understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken," President Bush said yesterday in Cleveland. "Others look at the violence they see each night on their television screens, and they wonder how I can remain so optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq. They wonder what I see that they don't."

Bush tried to explain. But in the end, what he provided was yet another example of what others see -- and he doesn't.

That would be reality.

The best Bush could do was tell the story of Tall Afar, a city in northern Iraq. "The example of Tall Afar gives me confidence in our strategy," he said. Tall Afar, he said, was once "a key base of operations for al Qaeda and is today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq."

The Washington Post provided some reality checks by a reporter there.

Peter Baker, working with "a Washington Post employee in Iraq," writes this morning: "Reports from the streets of Tall Afar, half a world away, offer a more complex story. U.S. forces last fall did drive out radicals who had brutalized the mid-size city near the Syrian border. But lately, residents say, the city has taken another dark turn. 'The armed men are fewer,' Nassir Sebti, 42, an air-conditioning mechanic, told a Washington Post interviewer Monday, 'but the assassinations between Sunni and Shiites have increased.' "

As Baker writes, even Bush's success stories "seem to come with asterisks. The administration hailed the election of a new democratic parliament last year, but the new body has so far proved incapable of forming a government for more than three months. U.S. forces have trained more Iraqi security troops, but the only unit judged capable of acting fully independently of U.S. assistance no longer can.