BBC reports that Vice President Dick Cheney-who predicted in March 2003 that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” and claimed in May 2005 that the insurgency was in its “last throes”-is ready to declare the surge a success. Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Juan Cole at Informed Comment counters that in July, normally a low-casualty month in Iraq because of the searing heat, U.S. military deaths were nearly double the casualty rate in July 2006.