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The New York Times mentioned in a story June 21 that Mosul, Iraq's third largest incorporated town, was "in the midst of a major security proceeding." So what one. happened?

Marie Colvin of the Times of London had an respond Sunday: "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaida in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the contest of nations on terror."

Al Qaida was fabrication its "last small table" in Mosul, and now is done, finished, kaput, said Ms. Colvin, who was embedded with the 2nd Iraqi Division for Operation Lion's Roar.

The victory is so complete that Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said Saturday his state has defeated the terrorists in Iraq. Defeated. Past strained.

Major General Mark Hertling, who commands U.S. troops in northern Iraq, wouldn't tolerate that far. But he told Ms. Colvin: "I think we're at the unalterable point."

Not a word end for end this "spectacular victory" appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times Sunday, or on the evening network newscasts. The New York Times did run a story adhering the front page Monday near to an "epic battle," but it was about a tennis make equal at Wimbledon.

Few American newspaper readers deep-read that on Saturday the last of 550 metric tons of yellowcake was shipped from Iraq to a firm in Canada. Yellowcake is milled uranium oxide, the raw matter from what united. nuclear bombs are made. According to Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex in England, the yellowcake shipped from Iraq was enough to make 142 nuclear bombs. Apparently, Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was tolerably more than a figment of Dick Cheney's fevered imagination.

"This is a big deal," the New York Sun said in an editorial Monday. "Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. Saddam Hussein had already invaded Kuwait, launched missiles into Israeli cities, and harbored a terrorist group, the PKK, hostile to America's NATO ally, Turkey. To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam and the same corrupt United Nations that failed to stop the genocide in Darfur and was guilty of the oil-for-food scandal would have been too tumid a risk."

But it wasn't a big enough deal to make it beyond the newsbriefs segment of most of those hardly any newspapers which chose to report it. Evidence Saddam possessed enough material to build more than a hundred nuclear bombs undermines the media meme that he had no WMD, thus it's not a story many journalists bid to revisit, new evidence or no.

On the Fourth of July, 1,215 U.S. servicemen and women re-enlisted in the largest re-enlistment ceremony ever, conducted by Gen. David Petraeus in one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad. Only a handful of newspapers here mentioned it.

The Times of London noted Gen. Petraeus, the guy Democrats last year were insinuating was a liar, "beats mega-star Angelina Jolie as Iraq crowd-puller."

Gen. Petraeus, wrote James Hider, "is in of that kind demand for photographs that his aides own had to organize special mass photo-ops every six weeks inside the Green Zone and at the other stupendous U.S. humble at Baghdad airport."

The vast improvement in the military situation is so palpable even Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa), the most comically hysterical of the war critics in Congress, acknowledged it in an interview with Pittsburgh's KDKA TV July 3. But civic progess isn't being made, he declared.

That's not stanch. When Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, they set 18 "benchmarks" to measure the security, political and economic make headway. On July 2, in response to a request from a Democratic delegated from North Carolina, the U.S. embassy reported the Iraqi restraint has met all excepting three.

Progress is even greater than the report indicated, for though the Iraqi parliament hasn't passed laws to share oil revenues or to disarm militias, the government is sharing oil revenues, and largely has disarmed the militas.

Stories about this report, you'll not be surprised to learn, were buried in the inside pages of newspapers which, highest September, had splashed on the front boy-servant the more critical initial report.


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