Since when were car bombs quiet. I recommend you review the newspaper articles from Germany for the first three years following the end of World War II. Pay particular attention to articles regarding violence. Should we have given up?

Since when were car bombs not silent? I recommend you move on a few decades and pay particular attention to the mess in Iraq.

My guess is that people who are now so sensitive to the bad news from Iraq (many loud bombs, soldiers dying daily – some probably screaming very loudly in agony, the crying of woman and children etc.) have difficulty to accept the realities in Iraq. I don’t think a hand full knew anything about the dynamics of Iraq before the war. They were swept away by the high of fighting the ‘villain’ Saddam Hussein. Did you mention anything about loud bombs during the invasion of Iraq? Did they complain then or was it OK then?

Comparing the Iraq War to WW2, eh? Too bad Saddam never invaded any of our allies...too bad Saddam never actually struck at the USA. Do you remember our selfish reason for FINALLY getting involved in WW2? I do.

The war-supporters are grasping at straws if they're going to accuse US Media for an anti-Iraq-War bias when they simply report the facts. In my mind, the Media should be screaming about how this war was founded on lies every freakin' day until the people in the USA wake up and impeach Bush. But I'm biased.

The problem with your readers perception is that we are no longer as trusting of our media as we used to be.

Ever since we got away from the British standard of only the facts and with balance in the story we have lost faith. When the media is used to generate business it decimates it's credibility. When reporters just print the party line, oops, I mean print what Washington says to further political aims without fact checking and aggressive dissection it crumbles the very foundations of a free press.

We still have a mostly free press but it, just like a lot of other democratic institutions, is being eroded.

I love these comments above. They wake up in the morning and declare. "I'm sure there MUST be something I drag out of context, miss the point entirely and decare I am offended by it."

Though I appreciate youre literary device,I would contine forging ahead with as many adjectives as you like.. Youre there in an enviroment that would make most who rail against you break out in a cold sweat.As Jack once said "you cant handle the truth". I suspect many cant even begin to understand the FACTS. Even as illustrated on cnn, simple ones like how many americans are there. Forge ahead and ty

My grandson is on his 2nd tour in Iraq but home on leave. Unfortunately he has to go back but while he is here I have seen pictures on his computer from Iraq and what is happening. The press has not exaggerated the horrible mess over there. It is a civil war and our brave military are in the middle. This is a Bushmade disaster.

How many? George Bush declared some time ago that the "17 brigades there may be reduced once the Iraqi security forces can deal with the situation themselves".
A brigade has between 3000-5000 troops, I take it.
This would make it between 51000 and 85000 troops in total. Since, officially, there were over 130000 troops in Iraq at the time, I assume that Bush can not really have meant "17 brigades"- he must have been referring to "17 divisions".
A division has between 10000 and 15000 troops.
This, then, means between about 170000 and 255000 troops were in Iraq at that time.
I would assume that army-units in war-time are at their full levels as regards the number of troops.
Not all of them will have been sent to Iraq- someone has got to do the accounting back home.
Make it out for yourselves...

I hate to point out the ignorance or intellectual deficiencies of others, but I find it unacceptable to allow Mr. Payton's remarks comparing post War Two Germany to Today's Iraq fiasco as one and the same to pass, lest he mislead others not quite as historically informed.

Let me make this clear. There is absolutely no comparison between post-WWII Germany and Iraq. There was no pre-planned post-war insurgency near or on the scale of Iraq today. Germany's holdouts were primarily due to those german soldiers who had not realised the war was over, much like the Japanese hold-outs that persisted until decades after the war had been over on the many isolated pacific islands.

Iraq, however, is a full-scale 4th Generation warfare fought by state-less armies vs an occupation State army that has reverted to 3rd Generation tactics, thereby losing the initiative and ability to out-maneuver the insurgency. As one of the previous posters remarked, you are grasping at straws where there are none, Mr. Payton. Next you will tell us that the Vietnam and Korean Wars were raging American victories in Indochina.

Al:
How many Americans died in occupied Germany in the three years after WWII? 5? 10?
To compare our occupation of Germany with what's going on in Iraq is dishonest at best.

Good counterpunch Jane to all the blinder-wearing conservatives who refuse to wake up to the reality that the Iraq war is my generation's Vietnam (I'm 25).

Jane,
I think you guys are doing a great job. I believe facts are important and so are a adjectives. The more I listen and read from journalist on Iraq I find that many of you need to possible speak to those who are doing the diplomacy thing. It seems as though you guys have a much better sense of what is going on over there.

The secterian violence is getting so bad no matter what steps are taken, I believe the only way to stop it is too seperate the 2 groups. As was done in Berlin they may have to build a wall and keep the sides seperate. It may sound radical but if it saves lives till things settle down it'll be worth it.

i happened on a report yesterday by jane, the beginnings of the american news day. probably a morning show. the cheery anchor-woman went through her lines in a sing song way. "and there in baghdad we have jane... good morning jane!" jane rolled her eyes and looked worn out. i thought the same thing... yah, for you its a good morning... i doubt if iraqis can remember what one is. to those people who doubt the state of things, take a flight and then a walk-about in the city. i am sure you will find some good. perhaps a small wild flower growing out of a crack in the pavement where a rocket hit a few months ago? a nice sunrise before the blood-bath begins again? believe me, there is no left-wing conspiracy orchistrated to make this endevour look evil. it does it all by itself.

The article above states that most journalists do not care about spin. Jane also stated somewhere else that journalists do not pay for stories.
No- a lot of journalists do not care about spin. But a lot of them have nevertheless failed to do the most fundamental thing a journalist should be doing: They failed to ask questions, and they failed to question things. Things like the official story.
And yes- journalists occasionally *do* pay for stories. This was the case a few years ago, when a CNN-team found themselves in some hot water after they were caught paying youngsters in Berlin to perform a Nazi-salute for the cameras. (The parents of those youngsters were not particularily impressed...Neither were the German authorities. The Nazi-salute, along with Nazi-insignia, is illegal and subject to criminal prosecution.)
The fact is that journalists have been all too often complacent about their respective governments- not just in America, but everywhere.
When I went to school in Germany, I had a politics-teacher who explained that the press has a control-function, and that it is their job to question what their politicians are doing. The moment they fail to do that is the moment they become a tool- wittingly or unwittingly, they begin to repeat what the various "spokes-persons" want them to repeat. In Germany, this led to the principle of "Gleich-schaltung" ("Switching in line" or "Alignment"), which effectively meant that the sole person they were directly responsible to was Dr. Josef Goebbels, the minister for propaganda.
The press have been mis-used on more than one occasion over the last years- and not just since the advent of George Bush and the "Neo-cons". But they have also *allowed* themselves to be mis-used, by failing to question the facts with which they were presented. This is certainly not helped by economic pressures, which may result in almost hilarious results- such as publishers and their chief editors discouraging journalists from using archive-material on the grounds that that's "too costly and a waste of time".
Some of the first reports I remember of the invasion 2003 contained statements like the following:
"...and then our APC's drove past them...I mean, can you imagine their faces, sitting in front of their tents, suddenly being faced with all that high-tech stuff?"
He probably was already too far away to see them getting out their mobile phones to warn their relatives and tell them to switch on their sattelite-TV...

Men are like precious metals or stones, either they are genuine or fake.
Character shines in adversity, and that we have not seen in Cheney or his Boss.
I was sick the day I heard the president call nations the axis of evil on the world stage, and then I knew we have no statesman.
This was followed by bring them on, or get him did or alive, what a shame to express street language.
A leader that uses the Fs and Ss in public should be muzzled.
Unfortunately the people and the media were deceived by this secretive administration.
They are a miniature precedence to the biblical prophecy indicating that a ruler will be coming that will deceive nations and will lead the world to the Armageddon battle.
Does this sound now to be far fetched to the unfaithful, and the doubtful in the truth of the Bible?
Please wakeup Christian conservatives.

I just want our soliders to come home!

I get very disturbed when I see a journalist compromise had facts for political correctness.

I hold the press partially responsible for this bloody mess.

The Press in the US has allowed itself to be compromised by big business, political affiliations and fear of the establishment.

If the press had reported the known facts leading up to this disastrous war:

For example:

1. IAEA finds no signs that Saddam has weapons of mass distructions
2. CIA has no facts that Saddam has any links to religious extremists or Al-Qaeda
3. Neo-conservatives had always had an Iraqi invasion on their agenda before 9/11.

Then we wouldnt be in this mess.

You the press, owe it to the American people to report exactly what you know as fact, without bias of opinion or fear of reprisals.

This is the least you can do to make up for your failure to act as vanguards of truth leading to the Iraqi invasion.

Interesting that none of the "reporters" had in their headlines the Military Press Releases such as "Coalition finds weapons/munitions" or "Iraqi Army/Coalition forces detain 11 suspects". Even the MSNBC article today claims 111 killed in sectarian violence in the last 4 days. Based on my calculations that is 27.75 dead per day and far less than the hundreds that "reporters" have been claiming have occured daily. I'm sure you can come up with some more articles and double or triple count some of the dead in order to assure your self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in Iraq. Set aside the numbers of dead and ask, how many of the dead are actually "innocent victims" or trouble makers killed by revenge? For 20+ years now the Shiites have been victimized by the Sunnis even though the Shiites made up for the majority of the population and it's going to take a few more than 3 years for the Shiites to get the need for revenge out of their system."Reporters" don't want to report the news but would rather be cheerleaders for one side or the other and it's not the US's side. I still haven't forgotten about the "Green Helmet Guy" and doctored photos in the Israeli/Hezbo war. The MSM cheered for the Hezbos not because they really wanted Israel to lose but because they hated and despised the US more. Are Democrats, Liberals and Reporters unpatriotic? The way they report and comment on our military and our Commander In Chief would lead to only one answer, yes they are!

i will say it again.

there WERE people who knew this was a mistake from the very beginning. when it comes time to vote, we do not have to limit ourselves to democrats who supported the war at the beginning or republicans who support it now.

let's seek out those who had the courage and vision to oppose this catastrophe from the beginning. they deserve our vote.

let's purge government of the idiots, republican and democrat, who got us in this mess.

your vote counts!

In Reading some of the notes here it is apparent that you folks only list the subject matter that you feel goes with what you believe which in the real world is censorship, you folks are paid to report the news not re-write it to suit your own ends, maybe when you people lose someone close to you then you might wake up. Nobody likes a war but I would rather see this going on somewhere else than to have this here in this country.

I have spoken to four soldiers who have served in Iraq over the past 18-24 months time frame. None of these men know each other; their only connection to each other would be through me. Without fail, all of them have expressed unsolicited disappointment at the media's coverage of the war in Iraq.
They all feel that the high number of positive stories in the area are lost among the bad news. While all of them acknowledge that there were some tough times during their stint in Iraq, they all were very surprised by the country's beauty in its people. Each soldier had stories of the gratitude of the citizens in Iraq for even the opportunity for freedom that the US, Britain, and other countries were offering. Two of the soldiers had stories of meals that they shared with Iraqi families and gifts that were exchanged. One soldier told me about how his team rebuilt 4 homes for Iraqi families. He said that the father's emotional response to the kindness shown to his family was overwhelming to watch.
I am not foolish enough to think that war is pretty and all positive. However, I do find it disheartening that I have yet to see any story remotely like the ones I have mentioned making their way to the front page of the New York Times or the top story on the NBC Nightly News.
War is long and tough. My grandfathers fought hard to secure this land from the threats of others. I understand the cost of liberty for all. I want my childred to understand it as well. I hope that the media will do its share to partner with me in this goal.

The total number of US combat fatalities in the Occupation of Japan, Germany and the 1990s occupation in Bosnia was....ZERO. The Bush apologists have tried to compare this fiasco in Iraq to those "occupations" It will not work if you know the facts. As far as "It is a long hard road" as Bush keeps saying. Besides the less than 1% of this country that is in the military or directly related to them it has Never been a hard road for even one second.
Keep up the good work with the truth from Baghdad and we all know it is a thousand times worse than you are allowed to report.

how about:

2006 and Iraqis are murdering each other by the hundreds each day, not unlike they were 3000 years ago.

'journalistic ethics'

Surveys of journalists’ self-reported voting habits show them backing the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1964, including landslide losers George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. In 2004, a poll conducted by the University of Connecticut found journalists backed John Kerry over George W. Bush by a greater than two-to-one margin.

Compared to their audiences, journalists are far more likely to say they are Democrats or liberals, and they espouse liberal positions on a wide variety of issues. A 2005 poll by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press found five times more journalists described themselves as “liberal” as said they were “conservative.”

A number of journalists have admitted that the majority of their brethren approach the news from a liberal angle. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas predicted that sympathetic media coverage would boost Kerry’s vote by “maybe 15 points,” which he later revised to five points. In 2005, ex-CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter confessed he stopped watching his old network: “The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me.”

Many journalists continue to deny the liberal bias that taints their profession. During the height of CBS’s forged memo scandal during the 2004 campaign, Dan Rather insisted that the problem wasn’t his bias, it was his anybody who criticized him. “People who are so passionately partisan politically or ideologically committed basically say, ‘Because he won’t report it our way, we’re going to hang something bad around his neck and choke him with it, check him out of existence if we can, if not make him feel great pain,’” Rather told USA Today in September 2005. “They know that I’m fiercely independent and that’s what drives them up a wall.”