The dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch became one of the big moments of the war, but her Iraqi doctors say the rescue was staged. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital. "It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions.

"Now that the feel-good, flag-waving part of war is over, the real culprits, the commercial-broadcast media, are going to pack up and leave," says longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges. "What they've done is a huge disservice to the nation. They have no sense of responsibility to continue reporting as the story gets more complicated and difficult to report." The result, he fears, is that "we'll see Iraq in terms of flare-ups and incidents, without any context or sense of what's happening or why. That makes it difficult for us to have informed judgments."

The White House expects congressional funding to the tune of $64 million for the first-ever, 24-hour Arabic-language satellite television network. "The aim is to provide the Middle East's tens of millions of viewers with an alternative to their usual viewing diet of unremediated anti-American propaganda," the Hill's Melissa Seckora reports.