The Conclusion From the Use of Superlatives

It's the civil war unleashed by Bush's invasion of Iraq that has resulted in a torrential bloodletting in Iraq.

There are currently 3,500 dead Americans in Iraq along with violence in 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces (the others being entirely peaceful). May I ask how Mo Rocca would describe the situation if there were twice as many deaths and twice as much violence (7,000 Americans down and violence in 6 provinces)? You can hardly use expressions like "torrential bloodletting", "the daily mass slaughter of innocents", "the unending nightmare in Iraq" (Keith Olbermann), and/or "the most disastrous military adventure since the founding of the republic" (IHT letter) because they are superlatives that you have already used.

As for "the Iraq invasion [being] the worst foreign policy error in our nation's history", World War II faced America with over 400,000 lives lost (not to mention the other nations' millions of deaths) in much less time and somehow I don't really remember (angry) expressions such as "torrential bloodletting", "the daily mass slaughter of innocents", "the unending nightmare", and/or "the most disastrous military adventure since the founding of the republic" being used there — even in news items and news reels from the early 1940s! It doesn't sound right, because it sounds too impassioned (although, again, for a war with more than 100 times more deaths in fewer years and months).

I submit to you that the only conclusion that can be arrived at here is the following: all those expressions have little to nothing to do with the objective descriptive reality, but have everything with presenting opposition to Dubya. Which is entirely fine, of course. Just one thing: don't pretend that your language is free of partisanship and that it is supposed to reflect objective descriptions and the unfailing truth.