Apparently today's good news from Iraq is an upcoming hanging.

[struggle4progress]

Our President cheers this as "a milestone." That's a nightmarish image ...

... a road with gallows for milestones. It can only be the frontiers of the Land of the Damned.

The maps that lead to Hell are unstable and changing things. We pick a destination and set off -- but when we consults the map again, the original destination no longer appears. Look at this map, for example! It once showed a hamlet called Mushroom Clouds and beyond it a vacation spot named Candy Flowers. Neither place existed. Neither shows on the map today. If we could only remember how the map once read -- but by now, of course, the map has changed innumerable times.

Soon enough, not only the map but the road itself loses all constancy. Turning around and heading back along the road that brought us here, we do not return to the place from which we originally began.

And then the voices begin: You must follow the map. Stay a while longer. You cannot leave yet ...