Bastard Sword, whose excellent work has been noted here before, is taking a walk on the serious side and responding to Steven Den Beste's run-in with French journalists who happen to be on the terrorists' side. Concluding, he encapsulates the makeover on the war on terror many press agencies are attempting:

Well, we already know that Iraq is filled with remnant Ba'athists and fundamentalist revolutionaries itching to sieze power, this is not news. We know they can't win if we don't let them, yet the press continues to push the idea that we are either beset on the one hand or overbearing on the other. Basically what we see in these contradictory opinions are competing mental models of how it is we eventually get defeated, and why. But the trouble with having a bad storyline is that the facts on the ground keep defying prediction, as if the actors won't stick to the script. So writing becomes a constant scramble to gloss over what you'd just set up for upcoming episodes while scrambling to make the new dialogue fit the story. Such scrambles always make for fun Fisks since you can just keep pulling up the same person's contradictory statements from a few weeks prior.

Moreover, America and the West have seen this story before — what's being written is journalism's unoriginal fan fiction. They say "never get between a Vietnam protester, his admirers and their self-adulation," but Iraq is too important not to.