I'm a realist. Television rules the world, and television is telling the boobs that the war is already lost.
I realize that it's being slowly won in Iraq proper, but it's the "slowly" that's important. Americans are notorious for being impatient, and unless certain steps are taken, the war will be lost here at home. It's gone on too long. Unfortunately, those "steps" require amplification of the military effort, which will NEVER go over well here at home, not with the media concentrating on losses and not gains.
History teaches that all war is psychology, bending the will of your enemy to match your own. The killing of terrorists is secondary. Body counts don't count. Television coverage does. That's the lesson of Viet Nam. (Oops! I used the VN term!)
Television was telling "the boobs" that Iraq had WMD before the war, when there were plenty of sources that said otherwise. Why weren't the people boobs then but they are now?
But the media hasn't really been going into very much in depth reporting. Most mainstream Western journalists are confined to near their hotels in Baghdad because it is too dangerous to venture very much out into the field. What does that tell you about how well things are going? It's mostly independent journalists from foreign countries who are going out. The poll numbers would otherwise be a lot worse for Bush.