Progress report:

About six weeks ago, I stood here and described for you the state of Al Anbar Province, which has almost one-third of the land mass of all of Iraq and was part of the former Ba'athist stronghold. I described then that we were turning the corner in the West, and I'm here to tell you that we have turned that corner.

This sounds like good news, although maybe a bit premature IMO. Rumsfeld, in other interviews today, is a bit more cautious:

Q: Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask you about the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. I notice that a number of commanders there have said in recent days that not only has the number of attacks gone down, but the devices and the approaches used by the attackers have become less effective and a little more haphazard, suggesting that perhaps their resources are diminishing. I'm wondering if you are seeing indications that the resistance is fizzling or that you've broken the back of them?

Rumsfeld: You know, I see numbers that drop down, and the question is when is it a trend, and when might it turn and go up again? And I'm kind of conservative on predicting those things. And I guess my instinct is to -- I look at the numbers every week and see how many IUDs they have captured unexploded, I see how many were exploded; I see how many caches of weapons of various types have been captured; how many people were detained and arrested and captured, and how many of those were let go after it was clear that they were just scooped up in a broader net -- and the numbers are large. And you look at it and -- how many of the enemy were killed and wounded in an effort to attack our people or the Iraqi people? You see all that, and rather than leaping to a conclusion about it, my instinct is to let it run for a period of months.