"It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading"

There’s a sobering piece by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent entitled And they call it peace: Inside Iraq, four years on:

The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt. My best bet was to go to Sulaymaniyah[…] then drive south, sticking to a road running through Kurdish towns and villages to Khanaqin, a relatively safe Kurdish enclave in north-east Diyala province, one of the more violent places in Iraq.
We start for the south through heavy rain, and turn sharp east at Kalar, a grubby Kurdish town, to Jalawlah, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town where there has been fighting. […] We go to the heavily guarded office of the deputy head of the PUK, Mamosta Saleh, who says the situation in Diyala is getting worse. The insurgents have control of Baquba, the provincial capital….
Baquba is only 30 miles from Baghdad. It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading.

Or as if the government in Washington DC had lost control of Annapolis or Baltimore..