Read your own links, Putz.

(Pictured: an inconsequential event at Abu Ghraib, exploited by the media to help the terrorists win the war.)

Putz, linking to Michael Yon today, cites this one passage:

"I’ve been back in Iraq now for about three months, and sadly have to report that, despite signs of progress in many key areas of the battle space, the conditions on the media/military front have not improved since early 2005."

If only the media would cooperate, we'd win the war. Yawn.

But here's a passage from Yon's post that Putz conveniently ignored:

Abu Ghraib hit the headlines. The war flared even more intensely as these photos became al Qaeda’s best recruitment posters. The very moment I saw the photo above [hooded man standing on battery], I saw the cancer it was, and cringed at how it surely would deform part of American and world history. We would never shake it, and we could never make it right. Like the iconic image of the little naked girl running from the napalmed Vietnamese village, this image would always be emblematic of this war. As with Mai Lai, we remembered the villains at the expense of the heroes, and turned on our heroes for exposing the villains in the first place, finally blaming the media for telling any of it.

Many in the U.S. blamed the media for reporting Abu Ghraib, but it wasn’t the press who was abusing prisoners for entertainment while taking pictures. That was MY Army. The Army I am very happy to brag that I served in. The Army I tell many people to join. That was NOT the Army I had served in, or that so many of my friends are still in today.

Counterinsurgency? Abu Ghraib was proinsurgency.

I find Yon to be a very odd duck, but he was dead right about the seriousness of Abu Ghraib (though he weirdly ignores the Bush administration's policies that led directly to the abuses there).

Putz, on the other hand, spent months tut-tutting Abu Ghraib. In this post he scolds Andrew Sullivan for focusing too much on it.

I do confess that I think that winning the war is much more important than Abu Ghraib, and that viewing the entire war -- and the entire American military -- through the prism of Abu Ghraib is as unfair as judging all Muslims by the acts of terrorists. Andrew has chosen the role of emoter-in-chief on these subjects, and he's welcome to it, though he would be more convincing in that part if he didn't count wrapping people in the Israeli flag as torture.

But while I think that what happened at Abu Ghraib was bad, and that it should be punished, and that Koran-flushing (if it had happened) would have been bad, though not torturous, I don't think it's terribly important compared to the war as a whole, and I think that it takes a peculiar perspective to make it emblematic of the war, and of the American military, which seems to be where Andrew is going these days, at least to judge -- as he invites us to -- by the volume of posts. Every war has its Abu Ghraibs -- and, usually, its Dresdens and its Atlantas, which this war has lacked, not because America didn't have the ability, but because it possessed a decency and restraint that gets small credit.

How stunningly wrong was that?

Putz didn't think Abu Ghraib was "terribly important," failed to recognize how Abu Grhaib made "winning the war" much more difficult, failed to hold the Bush administration responsible for jeopardizing American lives and the war effort through its wreckless and un-American torture policies, accused those who recognized the gravity of Abu Grhaib of having some warped, anti-American perspective, and again and again, essentially used the whole event to flog the media.

You'd think Putz would be the slightest bit chastened by just how wrong he was, yet even today, it's still all about blaming the media.