No, I didn't take the doom-and-gloom reports seriously ("Piling up Disasters/Marking the Footage 'Raw'"), either. An incredibly balanced report from the Weekly Standard's Reuel Marc Gerecht:

With rare exceptions, Western newspapers, magazines, TV news, and radio uniformly tell the story of increasingly effective guerrilla movements, random violence, theft, rape, rising religious extremism, Shiite clerical dissatisfaction, Sunni Arab bitterness, antidemocratic tribalism and nationalism, angry and despairing U.S. soldiers, and even more distressed congressmen and anonymous U.S. officials. Poor American administration of the country, per this reporting--as always, most trenchantly expressed by the BBC--is producing an ill-tempered, ever more anti-American Iraqi population whose thankfulness for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's rule is probably ending.

[...]

AS I WALKED the streets of Baghdad at night, which in most districts of the city isn't a particularly dangerous thing to do, as I visited mosques and clerics in the Sunni and Shiite lands to the north and south, I picked up a fairly acute case of cognitive dissonance. Reading too much of the Western press before and especially during a visit to Iraq is mentally unbalancing. Though the problems in Iraq are enormous and the isolation of many U.S. officials in the Jumhuriyah Palace headquarters in Baghdad is surreal, neither the country nor its American administrators appeared to be sliding downhill into chaos. In most of Iraq--in the key areas of the country, in the Shiite south, the Kurdish north, and in Baghdad--just the opposite is happening. Productive energy and commerce are slowly returning to the streets, which is impressive given how long it is taking to rebuild a functioning nationwide telephone system. In mid to late June, U.S. officials--for all their clumsiness, lack of language skills, and enthusiastic ethos of "force protection"--appeared to be drawing closer to the Iraqi population, not farther away. This was especially true in the Shiite regions of Iraq, which are essentially everything from Baghdad south.

This conflict won't end any time soon, and it's quite obvious that Iraq's democratic rebirth is vital to winning the larger war. Now is not the time to play fair-weather friend to a prosecution that not only protects the free world but liberates those held in bondage.