Making things even more fun. Michael Yon's assessment of why we don't 'get' what is really going on in Iraq amounts to (paraphrasins), "the military telling imbedded reporters to sit on things that are hardly secret to the people they are trying to keep it from, but which the non-imbedded press doesn't know about, only to days after the fact put out simple, virtually useless reports to the mass media, without telling the imbedded people they are doing so. The result, the mass media tries to 'interpret' events with almost no context or actual information." One example he gives is an inaccurate and barely recognizable page six news paper article on a letter to Al Queda from a high ranking official in Mosul, which states that the network there is disintegrating. First it ended up on page 6, and second, it didn't even come close to reporting the facts of the situation.

http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/2005/08/proximity-delays.html

However, the good news is that the DOD finally (after more than two years) figured out that 'maybe' it would be useful to report on things like reconstruction and the like....:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2005/20050820_2493.html

If we ever do withdraw, it will be the first war in history (I don't think Vietnam is even close to this screwed up), that we lost because of failing to report what was actually happening, instead of just letting people invent their own analysis of only 5% of the actual information.