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Well, always takes me a little while to sort out strange beliefs on FR (took me a while to figure out the various reasons why people WANTED more terrorist attacks on the US and got very upset when there weren't a lot).....

Still mulling over the defeatist agreeing with the media today; haven't TOTALLY figured it out....

One PORTION of it (not all of it) is the people that literally want the entire country of Iraq nuked or carpet bombed and they're being defeatist in hopes it supports their argument in favor of doing so; probably the same people that thought that piece of s*** Calley was a hero at My Lai.

But mainly is that there was a poor job of "expectation management" in general..I don't know if it was the administration, really...not certain what they could have done.

But as we all know, if, say, a party goes into an election expecting to pick up 20 seats in the House and they only gain 10 seats, it's interpreted as a disaster for the party picking up "only" 10 seats. You want to try to get the media to expect your party to pick up 5 seats if there are a lot of pollsters saying you'll pick up 20.

And contributing to the "expectation management" problem is the utter ignorance of military history of most people. Things like the Friction of War that have been understood for decades are totally new concepts to such people. These are the people "shocked" that a column could take a wrong turn and get captured.

I'm a very intelligent person that loves maps and knows where I am, and driving in unfamiliar areas I've taken wrong turns; so has everyone else on this thread. Except when I do it, I get to where I'm going five minutes later; in Iraq, you're killed or captured.

I think all of us need to relax a little and not expect a one-week total victory with no casualties. Anyone who expected such is living in a fantasy land.

To use a football analogy, we're ahead 28-2 in the first quarter. Unfortunately, the other team's fans (media, commies, arabs) are concentrating on the safety they managed to score and our own fans are disheartened that we made an error that yielded points to the other team. Instead of going nuts and getting defensive, we should be chanting "scoreboard!"