The images projected relentlessly around the world are becoming numbingly familiar, the smoke and flames over Baghdad, the terrified faces of prisoners of war, the broken and sometimes lifeless bodies of the American, British and Iraqi military, and the mounting civilian casualties, including children. What remains invisible to most of the world is the dreadful day-to-day reality behind those searing televised images, the daily lives of the Iraqi noncombatants. While a full-scale humanitarian crisis has not yet developed, conditions on the ground are extremely dangerous and reports are emerging of children in southern Iraq falling ill because of a lack of potable water, sanitation facilities and medical supplies....

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, there has been a change in public opinion. We're all doing daily tracking polls. The public is getting this 24/7. In the first few days when it looked like we might have killed Saddam Hussein, we're negotiating with the generals on cell phones and maybe there is not a battle of Baghdad, we were getting 80 percent, close to 80 percent saying this is going very well. One day later, Sunday, we had casualties, first prisoners of war, drops to 50 percent -- more casualties by the next day, more prisoners of war, it is at 40 percent. We've had about 40 percent saying it is going very well with almost as many saying fairly well.
The optimism about the war has changed. The Washington Post has people saying it is not going to take weeks; it’s going to take months. That's the new consensus view, and the public is much more inclined to see this as a long war rather than a short, easy Gulf War model of war. But throughout these daily polls each night we get 70 percent saying that we made the right decision; 70 percent saying we approve of the way the president is handling -- dealing with this war.

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Persian Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the gulf state where our war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people.

That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.
The exchanges' complaint against Al Jazeera is that it is not "responsible." This is a cryptic allegation but it seems linked to the television station's decision last Sunday to show images of dead American and British soldiers as well as P.O.W.'s in Iraq. But Al Jazeera says that after the Pentagon asked it to remove the pictures until families had been notified it did so for eight hours, while the television stations of numerous countries continued to show them.

In truth, it seems that New York's exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere; that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if our hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind us, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station we should encourage.

It is the only Arabic television station that regularly interviews Israeli officials. It is also an important forum for American officials. Last week alone, it interviewed three senior members of the American government, including Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Al Jazeera has also been a vital source of information about Al Qaeda. Its reporters have had access to Qaeda leaders, and tapes of Osama bin Laden have found their way to the station's offices. This has been a useful window on a world that for too long has been utterly alien to us.

The ban on Al Jazeera by the princes of the free market puts them in impressive company. Libya and Tunisia have both complained that Al Jazeera gives too much airtime to opposition leaders. Jordan has thrown it out. Kuwait refused visas to its correspondents who were to be placed with American forces based there.

If a free, uncensored press ever arrives in the Arab world, many Americans will be shocked by what it says. Then, the energetic if somewhat tendentious broadcasts of Al Jazeera will seem, in comparison, like the nuanced objectivity of the BBC. For right now, Al Jazeera deserves all the help and support it can get.

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world. That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war. ...Unwittingly, Bush may be applying all the wrong lessons from America’s worst military disasters of the past 40-plus years. He’s mixing risky military tactics with a heavy reliance on propaganda and a large dose of wishful thinking. Bush also has guessed wrong on the one crucial ingredient that would separate meaningful victory from the political defeat that is now looming. He completely miscalculated the reaction of the Iraqi people to an invasion.More and more, Bush appears to be heading toward that ultimate lesson of U.S. military futility. He’s committed himself – and the nation – to destroying Iraq in order to save it.