HOW’S THE WAR GOING? I’ve got a post on the subject over at GlennReynolds.com — and check out Will Femia’s look at how Big Media and weblogs are doing.
UPDATE: Steven Levy writes on warblogging and leads off with Sean-Paul Kelley and The Command Post.
Meanwhile, Power Line compares an article in the Washington Post by reporter Alan Sipress with one that Sipress wrote during the Afghan war and finds surprising similarities. Or maybe not-so-surprising similarities:
Sipress is one of the loudest of the “this is turning out to be more difficult than we thought” chorus. Really, though, his own experience should warn him against getting too hysterical. On November 9, 2001, Sipress wrote an article in the Post titled “Vajpayee Says U.S. Wasn’t Ready for War”, in which he quoted, with obvious approval, the Indian Prime Minister who said that “the United States had not been adequately prepared for the [Afghanistan] campaign;” “it appears the Taliban are well entrenched;” “the U.S. military campaign has suffered from a lack of adequate intelligence;” and “the campaign [will] continue to move slowly” because “it appears America was not prepared for this kind of war.”
Kabul fell four days later.
Heh. Rand Simberg has sympathy for the press.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s Mark Steyn’s take on how it’s going:
In so far as the enemy has a strategy, it’s to use their own people as hostages. The ‘pockets of resistance’ in the southern towns have been able to make mischief because they blend in with the local populations. They know that Washington and its allies are concerned above all to avoid casualties among Iraqi civilians and, indeed, among your typical Iraqi conscripts. In other words, everything the Baath regime does is predicated on the moral superiority of their foe. If things were the other way round, if Iraq invaded Vermont and some diehard Yankees holed up on the outskirts of White River Junction and started firing on Saddam’s forces as they attempted to advance up the valley, the Republican Guard would think nothing of levelling the entire downtown area and everyone in it. Who’s going to complain? There’s no Baghdad ‘Not In Our Name’ movement.
So Harold ‘Poems R Us’ Pinter may think the Yanks are itching to massacre thousands of innocents, but the behaviour of the Baathist nutters suggests they know better: they assume Western decency.
His bottom line:
Well, speaking as someone not privy to the entrails of the Reuters chicken, let me go out on a limb here: the Anglo-Aussie-American forces will win. And the way they win will have tremendous implications for the years ahead.
Read the whole thing, as they say. And read Stephen Green’s thank-you to Britain — which is a lot more than just a “thank you.”
And, finally, David Adesnik rates the questions from yesterday’s Bush/Blair press conference and calls them “confrontational — and predictable.” Yep. They’re like sophomores, showing off for freshmen.
OKAY, ONE MORE: Read this bit of archival press criticism from Toren Smith.