Go read this column by David Warren, which opens with this graf:

You wouldn't know it from reading most of the papers, but the war in Iraq is going fabulously well. After just five days the U.S. Third Infantry Division and supporting units are approaching Baghdad. The immense steel column continues to drive reinforcements across the Iraqi desert, while its leading edge rumbles through the fields, villages, and waterways of Mesopotamia. To its rear, the "sleeper cells" of Ba'athist and terrorist hitmen waiting in ambush are being eliminated one by one. Special forces have seized bridges, dams, airstrips, oil and gas fields, and weapons sites all over the country. The U.S. Air Force has devastated leadership targets, military infrastructure, and the physical symbols of the Saddam regime, across Baghdad and elsewhere. Allied troops have Basra, Nasiriyah, now Karbala, and other Iraqi cities surrounded, and are tightening each noose. Snipers in the towns are being patiently deleted. The "Scud box" of western Iraq is in allied hands, daily more secure, and allied forces are building with endless air deployments to the northern front. In all, the allies have taken only a few dozen killed, and a couple hundred lesser casualties -- many of these from small accidents within the most amazing and vast logistical exercise since our troops landed in Normandy (when we lost men at the rate of up to 500 a minute, liberating France).

Then go check the front page of the NY Times.

First, there is Michael Gordon's The Goal Is Baghdad, but at What Cost?, charitably labeled as a 'military analysis' and running with this tag:

The cost of taking Baghdad and dislodging Saddam Hussein's government, in terms of both allied and Iraqi casualties, is uncertain.

The second story is titled G.I.'s Regroup After Setback — 2 Prisoners on Iraq TV.

Obviously it is time to quit- the NY Times has lost her will, particularly if you read the lead editorial:

As American forces began skirmishing with Iraq's Republican Guard troops on the drive toward Baghdad yesterday, Iraq's best soldiers seemed in no mood to lay down their arms. Army Apache helicopters attacked and destroyed up to 15 armored vehicles of a Republican Guard division in central Iraq but were driven back by a ferocious hail of small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Virtually all the Apaches were hit, and one went down. It was the latest evidence that some of the initial hopes — even assumptions — that Iraqi resistance would quickly crumble seemed not to be panning out.

The American and British military are prepared to fight a war against a resistant enemy, and they insisted yesterday that everything was on or ahead of schedule. But the public had reason to expect something different. The Bush administration had conveyed the impression that the Iraqi government was shaky, that much of the army was not likely to fight and that the Iraqi people would welcome the invasion force with cheers and flowers.

I guess we can count the NY Times as the only paper or people on the planet who were unaware that the Iraqis might shoot back- which makes their vehement opposition to the war even more interesting.