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Leading lawmaker dismisses US scholars' upbeat report on Iraq Jul 31 01:18 PM US/Eastern A top Democratic lawmaker Tuesday dismissed the findings of two longtime Iraq war critics, who cited a dramatic improvement in the situation there following the infusion of thousands of additional US troops. "I dismiss it at as rhetoric," said US Representative John Murtha, a former marine, congressional heavyweight on military matters, and outspoken Iraq War critic. "I don't know where they were staying. I don't know what they saw. But I know this: that it's not getting better," Murtha said on CNN television. "It's over-optimist. It's...

On Sunday, NewsBusters reported a shocking discussion that ensued on "The Chris Matthews Show" wherein five liberal media members actually debated why America shouldn't withdraw its troops from Iraq. Maybe more shocking, the following day, an op-ed was published in the New York Times claiming that "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, "morale is high," and, as a result, this is "a war we just might win." Adding to the shock is that this piece was written by two members of the Brookings Institution, which even Wikipedia acknowledges is "widely regarded as being politically liberal." The authors - Michael...

Victor Davis Hanson once opined that the war in Iraq could be won in 30 days if all media coverage were banned. The chance of that happening is pretty close to zero (unless, of course, Hillary gets elected). But there are curious rumblings in the mainstream media. After five years of relentless antiwar reporting, after five years of headlining the mistakes and miscalculations of the Bush administrations, two events last Sunday signalled a possible turnaround in the way the 'mainstream media' covers the war.

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place. Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - Despite having collected substantial information about Iran's nuclear and weapons programs over the last several ears, Western officials have limited intelligence about the crucial question of whether Tehran is trying to meld those two programs to produce a nuclear warhead that can be carried by a missile, administration officials said Friday. The inability to answer that question so far poses an obstacle to the Bush administration's efforts to press for a hard line against the Tehran government. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said this week that he had seen intelligence indicating that Iran was "working...