Ralph Peters says the media (and the Democrats) continue to get it wrong on Iraq.

That article says basically nothing - no facts, no evidence, not even quotes from sources just an oblique "my friend serving in Iraq said X"

What part of Iraq, what capacity?

It is irrelevent that more people died in a balcony collapse in Chicago, for the same reason it is irrelvent that a huge number more people have died in car accidents since the war ended. It is not a valid comparison.

I've heard so many times this mantra of "It will take months, but our troops will root out the killers. A year from now, we'll still see occasional acts of terror. But we won, the terror regime lost."

Only to start with it was Jay Garners 90 days, then it was an unspecified months, now I hear people are talking about 5 to 10 years.

This looked like Nortern Ireland in March and it gets more like it everyday.

Dave, I doubt you have any better access to the facts about the situation in Iraq than what comes from the mass media. And unless you have Peters's experience as a soldier, you probably don't have his ability to analyze the facts that he is getting from directly from his ex-comrades in Iraq. And that's exactly Peters's point. You're relying on the media to tell you what's going on, and they're distorting it for you.

I might well be, but that's not the point. This was poor quality journalism where he relies on the kind of logic you use to get a point across.

I can't rely on his "expert" knowledge anymore than I can rely on other portions of the media. However, given quotes from other senior military figures in field and factual data points, like numbers killed - I'm inclined not to believe him.

This sentence in particular caught my attention:

Last weekend, almost as many Americans died in a residential balcony collapse in Chicago as have been killed by hostile fire in "postwar" Iraq.

The truth hidden in this statement is one of the most distressing facts of the Iraqi conflict: The vast majority of U.S. casualites have been due to friendly fire. In an armed conflict, any time you are killing more of your guys than the enemy is, you have a real problem on your hands.