Fred Kaplan: Stonewall Petraeus. Last week's big no-new-news event was the testifying of Petraeus and Crocker before Congress. Yes, we've made progress, but no, not really. No, we can't withdraw any troops, because even if we've made progress it won't hold without the troops. Oh, and Iran is causing us a lot of trouble, although no way near as much as they might if they tried.

Fred Kaplan: Bush's Double Talk on Iraq. As usual, Bush heard what he wanted to hear from Petraeus, then made up some more for good measure.

Tony Karon: Iraq: Ain't a Damn Thing Changed. Karon was so impressed by the Petraeus-Crocker testimony that he decided to re-run a column he wrote on April 26, 2007, unchanged.

Helena Cobban: Iraq: A Sinkhole, Not a Quagmire. The semantic differences betwen sinkhole and quagmire are overstated -- even if quagmire suggests that there's a end point to slog to, it doesn't offer much confidence in one's ability to get there. Otherwise, a good summary of the present situation.

Frank Rich: The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook. Once and future drama critic: "The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak . . . He couldn't even argue that we're on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government of Nuri al-Maliki's." Last paragraph is worth quoting, referring back to the new Errol Morris documentary, Standard Operating Procedure:

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.