To read Bush's tame chorus or uncritical echo chamber on American talk shows, or in the syndicated columns, is to enter a dreamland where Iraq is now safe and secure thanks to the policy of finally encouraging local Sunni Muslim leaders in Anbar province. Sen. John McCain, in particular, is now claiming the pacification of Iraq is a triumph for his support of Gen. David Petraeus' "surge" policy over the past year. And not coincidentally, his fortunes are enjoying something of a revival as front-runner Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appears top stumble.

Yet the daily sober facts coming out of Iraq belie this naïve notion: Iraq is far from tamed.

Daily bombings continue to rock the country, especially the capital Baghdad. Some 35 people were killed in new suicide bomb attacks on Christmas day alone, making mockery of the self-congratulatory preening of some super-hawk die-hards. In a bitter irony so typical of U.S. policy in Iraq, one of them took place at the funeral of two Iraqi Sunnis accidentally killed in a U.S. air strike.

The very success of the U.S. policy of cooperation with the Sunni sheiks in central Iraq is resented and distrusted by the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. And on Christmas Day, a senior U.S. general was forced to flatly warn the Maliki government to get behind the sheiks, which they have conspicuously failed to do. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who commands U.S. forces south of Baghdad, gave the warning in a Christmas message of his own.

The Maliki government in any case remains a hollow shell with its large security forces incapable of mounting significant operations against Sunni insurgents and entirely unwilling to do so against major Shiite militias, who continue to exercise the real power across all of southern Iraq.

The U.S. policy of creating a Kurdish enclave in the north is coming apart at the seams and Turkey, America's own oldest and important ally in the Middle East, is now taking escalating military action against the untamable PKK guerrillas still operating out of it. On Christmas Day, the Turkish government in Ankara said it had carried out at least 200 air attacks on them in only 10 days since Dec. 16. It kept up the tempo with at least eight more on Wednesday. Thus, the administration cannot even get the tiny government it has installed over the Kurds to rein in their own extremists against Turkey, its own major and vital ally.

The belief in some conservative circles is that because they imagine their policy in Iraq is succeeding, they will have all the time in the world to remain there as the king making power for many years to come, as the British tried to do from 1918 to 1958.