The military generally has not wanted to give much publicity to counterattacks since the guerillas, whoever exactly they are, hide out among the civilian population, and our operations frequently collateral damage among civilians. That is the nature of guerilla war.

Is Mr. Sailer saying the primary reason we haven’t heard about U.S. responses to insurgents’ attacks is that our own military brass has downplayed them? However, if the reason for this silence is that there was collateral damage to civilians, surely the media itself would have brought that out, so that the story of the engagement would have come out in any case.

It could very well be that the Department of Defense has downplayed counterinsurgency operations (to revive a VN term), perhaps at the instance of the White House. The attacks requiring counterattacks are not supposed to be happening. After all, President Bush declared victory with rather hubristic fanfare several months ago, no doubt to the consternation of many officers and men actually in Iraq. We are meant to believe that Iraq is essentially pacified.

The steady drip of KIAs, now exacerbated by the multiple KIA aboard the CH-47, is making that pretense harder to maintain. No doubt there are tactical successes to report. That they are necessary calls into question whether we are achieving strategic success. DOD’s recent - and deeply duplicitous - decision to deny media coverage of the return of our dead soldiers’ bodies shows that the administration is well aware that it now has a PR problem.

While I always factor in media bias, I do not believe media mendacity about Iraq has yet plumbed the depths we saw in Vietnam. No doubt there are disparities between what they report and what is happening. Still, I do not think Americans are being misled as they were by coverage of the Tet Offensive of 1968. As most VFR-ers probably know, an overwhelming strategic and tactical defeat by U.S. and ARVN forces of an attempted NVA/VC offensive was presented to Americans as a strategic defeat of American forces and as the culmination of a series of our tactical failures. While that was very far from the truth, the perception trumped the reality.

Still, the administration and the media have fed us a number of fictions about the Iraq invasion, usually with some ulterior motive. The most obvious example is the saga of history’s most inflated Pfc., Jessica Lynch, so that Americans would see a war heroine who “proves” that the disastrous decisions that feminized the armed forces were wise ones. The most egregious is the one I mentioned above: the president posing in a borrowed flight suit declaring victory. He may yet pay dearly for that premature performance, not least because he has made it very difficult for the administration to be honest about how much remains to be done to pacify Iraq. HRS

While I liked Bush’s landing on the carrier when it happened, believing he had the right to crow after having achieved such a great victory against the opposition and contempt of most of the world, it was also a typical expression of Bush cockiness. I agree in retrospect that it was a mistake.