Cause For Hope?

Encouraging news from Iraq on the security front. The problem is that we've heard these kind of statements from Iraqi and U.S. officials before. What's more, the trajectory of the conflict over the course of the past few years has been characterized by cycles of extreme violence followed by cycles of less violence. The discouraging part of all this has been that each new cycle always seems to be more violent than the last one.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman makes a bunch of good points about this issue here.