Distortions and outright fabrications about the war: When troops come back complaining there aren't enough fights to go around, you are not losing

Much of the reporting on the war in Iraq suffers from [an] abandonment of integrity in pursuit of short-term profit

writes Patrick S Lasswell (quoting in the process Michael Totten's post about the media being "a total distortion machine" ["Baghdad is gigantic and sprawling. It looks much less ramshackle from the air than I expected. … The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic."]).

Even though it will cost the free people of the world massively if the United States abandons the Coalition and Iraq, the media continues to present distortions and outright fabrications about the conditions of the war. By maintaining a bubble of panic, they keep their sagging ratings afloat. But this panic is a bubble that may not last until a retreat occurs, and the bursting of that bubble must be terrifying to people profiting from it.

This weekend I talked with a Marine friend of mine who recently came back from a tour in Anbar province. His base was attacked (incompetently) twice while he was there, and that used to be the worst place in the whole country. He was disappointed in the level of action he saw and felt that as Marines his unit should have been rotated to the active fighting in Baghdad. When troops come back complaining that there aren't enough fights to go around, you are not losing.

If the Iraq panic bubble bursts before a retreat is forced on our otherwise undefeated military, the impact on the perpetrators of the bubble may be catastrophic.