Throughout the world, people are witnessing scenes of horror from Iraq on Al-Jazeera, the Arab cable news station. However, Al-Jazeera barely penetrates the United States. The network's newly-launched English-language web site remains down and may not be available for several weeks due to hacker attacks.

If you think you remember that we were promised a quick, easy war, your memory is not faulty. Eric Alterman has gone to the trouble of assembling some of those recent quotes in which Bush administration officials and pundits predicted, not that war is hell, but that it would be heaven. "Support for Saddam ... will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder," predicted Richard Perle.

"The current war has been called the best-covered war in history, and certainly the visuals and reports from 'embedded' reporters have been spectacular, bringing war into our living rooms like never before," Katie Delahaye Paine writes in her PR firm's publication The Measurement Standard. "[T]he embedded reporter tactic is sheer genius. ... The sagacity of the tactic is that it is based on the basic tenet of public relations: It's all about relationships.