The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

I am going to quote the following April 11, 2006 article at length, because we really have to keep our eyes on the ball.

THE US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program.

The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush Administration tie the war to the organisation responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The documents say that the US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. US authorities claim some success with the effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicise Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "US home audience" as a target of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role might have been overemphasised by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist.

Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers", Colonel Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, told an army meeting in Kansas last year.

In a transcript of the meeting, Colonel Harvey said, "Our own focus on al-Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will - made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

Let me translate that for you. The military decided to try to convince the Iraqis that all the car bombs that were going off and killing innocent civilians were not the work of any domestic opposition, but the work of foreigners. That was never true, but this was psychological warfare. At the same time, the administration was trying to convince the American public that our enemies in Iraq were not really patriotic nationalists, but the very people that attacked us on 9/11. These two goals them dovetailed into one overarching strategy of blaming virtually all turmoil in Iraq on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a one-legged Jordanian, that sprouted a second leg before he decapitated Nick Berg.

Unfortunately, this psychological operation has been so successful in muddying the debate over Iraq that our own analysts seem to fall for it when they do...well...analysis.

Views of the extent to which AQI has been vanquished also reflect differences over the extent to which it operates independently from Osama bin Laden's central al-Qaeda organization, based in Pakistan. "Everyone has an opinion about how franchisement of al-Qaeda works," a senior White House official said. "Is it through central control, or is it decentralized?" The answer to that question, the official said, affects "your ability to determine how successfully [AQI] has been defeated or neutralized. Is it 'game over'?"

This is like debating whether the moon is made of blue cheese or gorgonzola. The role of AQI was always more myth than reality. Most of the attacks that were attributed to them were carried out by Iraqis.

But there have been foreign fighters in Iraq. And some of those foreign fighters did take over certain neighborhoods and try to impose some strict interpretations of Islam...banning smoking, for example. In recent times, the military has been able to get some cooperation in tracking down these religious oppressors and doing them harm. It leads to things like this:

On Sunday afternoon, Salih Saif Aldin set out for one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. He knew exactly where to go. He nodded, smiled, grabbed his camera. There was nothing he needed to say.

Saif Aldin always came back -- from death threats, from beatings, from kidnappings, from detentions by American soldiers, from the country's most notorious and deadly terrain -- but on Sunday he didn't. The 32-year-old Iraqi reporter in The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau was shot once in the forehead in the southwestern neighborhood of Sadiyah. He was the latest in a long line of reporters, most of them Iraqis, to be killed while covering the Iraq war. He was the first for The Washington Post...

...Residents of the neighborhood and Iraqi military officers at the scene said Saif Aldin was killed while taking photographs on a street where several houses had been burned. His wounds appeared to indicate he was shot at close range. His body was later observed lying on the street, covered with newspapers.

The area Saif Aldin was visiting is dominated by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Some residents at the scene said they feared that soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia, were responsible for his death.

"They killed him," one man whispered, pointing at members of the Iraqi army brigade on the street.

Iraqi police officers said they believed Saif Aldin was killed by Sunni men belonging to the nascent organization known as the Awakening Council, a tribal organization aligned with the U.S. military that started in the western province of Anbar and has spread to parts of Baghdad. Iraqi government officials have accused these Sunni tribesmen of abusing their partnership with the Americans to kill and kidnap residents.

Saif Aldin was a fearless reporter...and a Sunni from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. It looks like he was killed by the very people (The Awakening Council) that the Bush administration claims is killing AQI members. Perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity and then thought Saif was a Shi'ite...or a foreigner...or a terrorist. Or maybe they just shot him for taking pictures.

Whatever the case, this is not 'kicking ass'.

The administration is wary of declaring victory over the largely mythical entity that they created.

While a victory declaration might have the "psychological aspect" of discouraging recruitment to a perceived lost cause, the White House official said, advantages overall would be minimal. "I recognize that there are pros to saying, 'Hey, listen, the bad guys are on the run.' " But if AQI were later able to demonstrate residual capabilities with a series of bombings, "even though it was temporary," he said, "the question becomes: How does this play out in terms of public opinion?"

Maybe the administration should try convincing the Washington Post that the bad guys are on the run. After all, their reporter just got capped at point blank range by the good guys.

And that tells you more about reality than any piece of crap front-page article about how we're near victory in Iraq but are afraid to announce it.