I had the television on for overexcited ambience the other night and Greta van Susteren of Fox News' On the Record was talking with embedded Fox journalist Greg Kelly, a former Marine himself and witness to the Allied trouncing of Saddam Hussein's war machine. Perhaps he'd been hanging around the wrong neighborhoods; maybe the doldrums seeping into the skin of some Third Infantry grunts and officers had begun to affect him. For goodness' sake, he could have coughed up for a flask or four at a Baghdad liquor store fifteen minutes before, and just so happens to be one of those "irritable" drunks.

Whatever haunted him, one aspect of his report was unmistakable: it was absolute, sincere and assured pessimism. His face was putting the proverbial 45-muscle-frown into double overtime; his listless drone and glassy stare like that of an eight-year-old burying his first dog, trowel still in hand. After watching his measured, slightly optimistic coverage in March and April, this only a bit less than completely out of character.

No, he informed Greta when she inquired, the deaths of Uday and Qusay hadn't dispelled the anger (anger!) that remained prevalent among Iraqis everywhere, of all ages. "Anger?" Greta asked. Anger, repeated Kelly, who went on to complete a picture of an ungrateful, bitter, dispossessed, misunderstanding Iraq where one would expect to see children attacking Allied troops in swarms and deformed, bruised men organizing violent protests to be allowed back into Qusay's finest secret police headquarters, strapping the private-part-electrodes back on themselves.

Well, not quite. But the man was emphatic; he had clearly been disillusioned. And, I fear, powerfully.

My first reaction, however, was to view his fallen spirits as isolated and incorrect. He seemed to be unaware of the typical nature of 20th-Century, American postwar occupation - myriad tiny mistakes and oversights, occasionally poor communication from occupier and the occupied, shifting tactics based on rapid changes in any given situation and other challenges that succeed in daily challenging the foundation of even the most self-confident occupation authority. Kelley was also missing all the triumphs of an otherwise steady stabilization, even in spite of continuing resistance from an honorless enemy.

The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot was in Iraq, too. His article on the trip, balanced by reasoned criticism of the Bush administration and considerations of adversity, is nevertheless a vastly different and nearly totally opposite impression:

[The] chairs [of the Shiite-composed, Najaf city council] are arrayed in a circle to hear from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who invites questions. The first man to speak wants to know two things: There's a U.S. election next year, and if President Bush loses will the Americans go home? And second, are you secretly holding Saddam Hussein in custody as a way to intimidate us with the fear that he might return? Mr. Wolfowitz replies no to both points, with more conviction on the second than the first. But the question reveals the complicated anxiety of the post-Saddam Iraqi mind.

Most reporting from Iraq suggests that the U.S. "occupation" isn't welcome here. But following Mr. Wolfowitz around the country I found precisely the opposite to be true. The majority aren't worried that we'll stay too long; they're petrified we'll leave too soon. Traumatized by 35 years of Saddam's terror, they fear we'll lose our nerve as casualties mount and leave them once again to the Baath Party's merciless revenge.

Tom Donnelly reported for the Weekly Standard that Saddam's power grid was designed precisely for population control, not popular satisfaction - leaving a task to the Allies not unlike using the available parts of a concentration camp to build a hospital.

The inhumane reversal of Saddam's domestic priorities goes much further:

The degradation of this oil-rich country is astonishing to behold. Like the Soviets, the dictator put more than a third of his GDP into his military--and his own palaces. "The scale of military infrastructure here is staggering," says Maj. Gen. David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne. His troops found one new Iraqi base that is large enough to hold his entire 18,500-man division.

Everything else looks like it hasn't been replaced in at least 30 years. The General Electric turbine at one power plant hails from 1965, the boiler at one factory from 1952. Textile looms are vintage 1930s. Peter McPherson, the top U.S. economic adviser here, estimates that rebuilding infrastructure will cost $150 billion over 10 years.

All of this makes the reconstruction effort vulnerable to even small acts of sabotage. The night before we visited Basra, someone had blown up electrical transmission pylons, shutting down power to much of the city. That in turn triggered long gas lines on the mere rumor that the pumps wouldn't work. Rebuilding all of this will take longer than anyone thought.

And who looks forward to the day-to-day reality of an often stressful, often tense occupation by a foreign army, however polite and helpful? Very few. But then, who wants to live for decades in horrific misery? No one:

Iraq's mental scars are even deeper. Nearly every Iraqi can tell a story about some Baath Party depredation. The dean of the new police academy in Baghdad spent a year in jail because his best friend turned him in when he'd said privately that "Saddam is no good." A "torture tree" behind that same academy contains the eerie indentations from rope marks where victims were tied. The new governor of Basra, a judge, was jailed for refusing to ignore corruption. Basra's white-and-blue secret police headquarters is called "the white lion," because Iraqis say it ate everyone who went inside.

"You have to understand it was a Stalinist state," says Iaian Pickard, one of the Brits helping to run Basra. "The structure of civic life has collapsed. It was run by the Baath Party and it simply went away. We're having to rebuild it from scratch."

And from Gigot's interactions, America has as many of the best as she could ever want in the arid land:

The U.S. media have focused on grumbling troops who want to go home, especially the Third Infantry Division near Baghdad. And having been in the region for some 260 days, the Third ID deserves a break. But among the troops I saw, morale remains remarkably high. To a soldier, they say the Iraqis want us here. They also explain their mission in a way that the American pundit class could stand to hear.

"I tell my troops every day that what we're doing is every bit as important as World War II," says one colonel, a brigade commander, in the 101st. "The chance to create a stable Iraq could help our security for the next 40 or 50 years." A one-star general in the same unit explains that his father served three tours in Vietnam and ultimately turned against that war. But what the 101st is doing "is a classic anti-insurgency campaign" to prevent something similar here.

These men are part of a younger Army officer corps that isn't traumatized by Vietnam or wedded to the Powell Doctrine. They understand what they are doing is vital to the success of the war on terror. They are candid in saying the hit-and-run attacks are likely to continue for months, but they are just as confident that they will inevitably break the Baathist network.

Read the Gigot article - the journalist himself a fantastically erudite author and exactly the kind of optimist to write a bellwether paper like this. Someone ought to send Greg Kelly a copy of today's WSJ, too. These two men might have crossed paths - or at least stood in the same corner of the city for a short time - yet they saw two different worlds, and came away with equally antithetical conclusions. But why begin to doubt in the face of past victories? All else being equal, I'll choose Gigot.