Here's an interesting exchange that took place late in Gen. Petraeus's testimony today. In the lead up to Petraeus's "report" there's been a lot of discussion of the September 2004 Washington Post editorial he wrote which not only seemed to track closely with the president's political campaign but also made arguments about how well things were going that in retrospect appear stunningly wrong. In short, Petraeus argued that things were going great in the training of the Iraqi security forces and victory was just around the corner.

This was going to be an awkward question to field. And one might have expected him simply to say that in retrospect things turned out to be a lot harder than he thought. But he actually defended the piece. And the manner of his defense is what interests me.

Petraeus says he was right. Things were going well with the security forces. But that was before the 2006 al-Askariya mosque bombing in Samarra. I won't say that this wasn't a major catalyzing event. But administration officials have increasingly seized upon it as a critical turning point of the occupation, which it quite simply was not.

That's convenient for them because it posits a very different narrative of events than most of us -- reality included -- believe in. In this alternative view, it was a hard slog before January 2006. There were mistakes and setbacks. But fundamentally the mission was on track and things were improving until a catastrophic and unpredicted event threw the whole operation into chaos.

It's not just Petraeus. Look back at President Bush's statements and the same argument comes up repeatedly from him as well.

But this argument doesn't square with any of the available facts. The best analogy is some variant of that darkly comic line about the guy falling from a tall building who gets asked, mid-fall, how things are going. So far, so good, he replies. In this case, it may be something like asking the guy what happened. And he replies, things were going well till we passed the second floor. From there on, it got very bad.

Pretty much everything we see began to happen in 2003, actually very soon after the invasion proper. It was all visible by the fall of that year. And every metric has been more or less downhill ever since.

The one thing that's clear in all the numbers from all the different sources is that things really spiraled out of control in the second half of 2006. But that was no more than an acceleration, probably an inevitable one, from everything that had been building up to that point.