Instapundit complains about the media coverage of Iraq:
The basic rule of press coverage is that if there’s fighting, we must be losing.
This is justifiable because it is true. The combat phase of the war ended nearly five years ago; there wasn’t much fighting taking place in Japan in 1950, after all. More importantly, fighting is a pretty strong indication that the “hearts and minds” strategy is not working. Ergo, we must be losing, as indeed we are. There’s not a lot of happy talk about Iraq democracy or comparisons to the post-WWII occupations, after all, but lots of sabre-rattling about Iran, and to a lesser extent, Syria.
This wasn’t exactly hard to predict; it’s precisely why I compared the conquest of Iraq to successfully invading Schleswig-Holstein in 1944 and announcing victory in Europe four years ago.