Jimbo, thanks, and call me what you want... John, JohnT, etc. No, it's not all the media's fault, jc. But, as I said in the original post, they do bear a part of the blame. Mostly, it is due to incompetence rather than anything else, I think. Consider the diminished quality of journalistic writing and research over the last 30 years. (If one goes back far enough, however, the writing gets even more partisan than it is today)

Zenpundit, you are dead on. I would just add that dissent and self criticism is a hallmark of the Western way of war - and one of its greatest strengths - as Victor Davis Hanson points out in his numerous books (see Carnage and Culture for example). This still doesn't change the fact that the enemy draws comfort from that dissent and seeks to use it to his advantage a la Zawahiri. Again, the issue is whether a greater good is served. But the answer is not to suppress the dissent but rather to, as John S. Mill would have us do, counter the arguments with fact and logic. That, I submit, is much of what takes place in this forum

Cheers

JohnT