The Germans are starting to notice that their leaders and media got everything wrong about the Iraq war. Even more amazing, it’s being reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

They don’t yet seem to have developed a taste for crow, though.

Reporters have largely failed to obtain mea culpas from the rejectionists, though the Green Party’s Beer said meekly in a brief statement, “Our assessment was based on information we received from aid organizations.”

Yes, and we all know how infallible and true-blue aid organizations are, right?

Television’s role in molding public opinion was underscored by a recent survey of youngsters at a Meunster high school who had taken part in anti-American peace marches.

None knew where Iraq is located geographically. Nor did any of them know anything about Hussein’s brutal regime. All said they got their information about “the American barbarity” from German media reports — chiefly those of ARD and ZDF.

One of Germany’s great literary figures, author- playwright Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 73, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “The great compassion shown by the media for the relatively few victims of the Iraq war stands in bizarre contrast to its lack of interest for the victims of 30 other and often far crueler wars currently being fought all over the world.”

Enzensberger also had bitter words for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched against the war chanting “No blood for oil.” It came, he said, “from the mouths of people who greatly value their automobiles, their heating systems and their vacation trips, and whose indignation would quickly find another target if the gas stations would be empty, the thermostat below freezing and all flights to…Mallorca were canceled.”

As they say, read the whole thing.