Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to put past differences behind them, paid a surprise joint visit to Iraq today to mobilize diplomatic and security forces and bolster the new government of Prime Minister Jawad al-Maliki.

This trip is clearly an engineered photo-op. I can see Bush ordering this trip at a principals meeting after Rice and Rumsfeld publicly disagreed about whether "errors" were made and whether they were strategic or tactical.

The George Packer story in the New Yorker is a good counterpoint to the Secretaries' spin in this news coverage.