A typical article in the New York Times recently intoned:

As the toll of American dead and wounded mounts in Iraq, some economists are arguing that the war’s costs, broadly measured, far outweigh its benefits. Studies of previous wars focused on the huge outlays for military operations. That is still a big concern, along with the collateral impact on such things as oil prices, economic growth and interest on the debt run up to pay for the war. Now some economists have added in the dollar value of a life lost in combat, and that has fed antiwar sentiment...

Yadda yadda yadda. You can fill in the rest blindfolded. As a corrective to such defeatism and a restorative for sanity, it is well worth reading a pair of companion pieces by Norman Podhoretz in the current and previous issues of Commentary. The first, which asks Who Is Lying About Iraq? answers that it is not, as papers like the New York Times would have us believe, President Bush, Tony Blair et al but the media and anti-war groupies themselves. As he says:

the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed

is itself a Big Lie. First, says Pohoretz even if it is stipulated that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Saddam’s Iraq – which he does not accept -- it does not follow that Bush lied, for the very good reason that he actually believed that Saddam had them:

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was ‘a slam dunk.’ This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate ( NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with ‘high confidence’ was that Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions. The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and—yes—France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix—who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past—lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion: ‘The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.’

The State Department was convinced; 20 UNSCOM inspectors were convinced; before them, Bill Clinton and Madeleine Allbright were convinced; Clinton’s Defence Secretary William Cohen was convinced; Tom Daschle and John Kerry were convinced. Next 'lie': President Bush said the threat from Saddam was imminent. Nope, he specifically rejected imminence as a justification for war. And as for the infamous case of former ambsssador Joseph Wilson, who bragged that he had debunked the 'lie' by President Bush that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger – well, Wilson’s actual report on his trip actually strengthened the CIA’s belief in the accuracy of the claim that Saddam had tried to buy the stuff, while British intelligence separately upheld it (although from a different source). Podhoretz concludes:

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq — the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy — have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.And for those who will have blinked at those last few words, now read the second piece in the current issue, The Panic Over Iraq, in which Podhoretz suggests of the rapidly spreading mood of panic that

the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the 'insurgents' from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with 'fierce resistance'? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between each of them and the Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news: it occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than 8 million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these 8 million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi Man in the Street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble…

Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable, and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building—from scratch—the political morale of a country ravaged by ‘post-totalitarian stress disorder,’ in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.

Great stuff. Read it all.