Are we getting the whole story out of Iraq? Will we ever? Is the deck stacked against us? Consider the following:

''I have a confession,'' wrote Salon Executive Editor Gary Kamiya on April 10. ''I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have identical feelings.''

Or take Jonathan Schell, writing in the Sept. 22 issue of the Nation: ''[Democratic Senator Joe] Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time.''

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who recently described US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as ''the man who trashed two countries''. Paul Krugman who, as Iraqis were still celebrating their freedom on April 11, could only sniff: ''I won't pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people. But there is a pattern in the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future.

And in France, Mathieu Lindon, a journalist writing in Liberation, described the mood of his colleagues: ''We are very interested in American deaths in Iraq .... We will never admit it, [but] every American soldier killed in Iraq causes, if not happiness, at least a certain satisfaction.''

Given that there was so much opposition to this war in the world press (in America too) is it any wonder that we hear only of the failures and nothing of the successes? Is this the way news should be?

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup