OK Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Teflon Don and others on the ground in Iraq have been reporting for several months that things were improving. This was later followed by the NYT OP-ED and the AP.

Well wonders never cease Der Spiegel has changed its opinion too.

RBT

HT David's Medienkritik

SPIEGEL ONLINE: "The US Military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe."

(By Ray Drake)

Historical consistency has never been a strong point for SPIEGEL magazine or SPIEGEL ONLINE - but this is shocking:

Just look at this article.

After years of calling Iraq a disaster, debacle and quagmire, SPIEGEL ONLINE has decided to declare the following:

"The US military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe."

This all stems from last week's Der SPIEGEL magazine cover feature article by Ullrich Fichtner: An enormous, fascinating and remarkably honest report on the complex situation in Iraq. (The first link above in bolded-italics leads to the English translation of that report.) SPIEGEL ONLINE is also publishing Fichtner's report that US troops are in a remarkably good mood and have high morale. That also flies directly in the face of past SPIEGEL reporting that consistently depicted US troops as demoralized, depressed, defeated, prone to suicide and suffering from low morale.

As a long-time observer of the publication, my first reaction to reading this on SPIEGEL ONLINE was: Are they on drugs?! - this directly contradicts everything they've reported for the past four years! My second reaction was: Have they finally gotten off the drugs?! Maybe reality is finally starting to sink in!

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