AT WAR: Thus Far.

In the first two weeks of war, our coalition forces have advanced quickly toward Baghdad; secured Iraq's southern oil fields; captured several bridges over the Euphrates; and taken complete ownership of Iraqi airspace. We have lost no engagements with the enemy. In the months leading up to the war, many people worried that it would start with chemical-weapons deployments and missile attacks on Israel. These have not happened. While every loss is one too many, we allies have suffered only 73 casualties, and only 7 of our people have been taken as POWs. Military historian John Keegan sums up the campaign's progress: "It has secured most of the territory and facilities over which it needs to operate, has a secure base, has acquired its own resupply port, dominates the enemy, and is not threatened by large- scale civilian disorder."

If this is a quagmire, let's have more of it.

It is not one, of course. Yet the media are clearly caught up in their peculiar Vietnam nostalgia. The phrase "credibility gap" is enjoying a comeback. (Somehow the credibility in question is never that of the media themselves.) The prevailing line is that the war is going worse than the Bush administration had led us to expect. Journalists are judging the war the way they judge presidential debates and primaries - - on the basis not of actual achievements but of "expectations."

A few -- a very few -- advocates of regime change in Iraq did indulge in reckless predictions that a war would be a "cakewalk." Stray comments from Bush administration officials to that effect can also be collected. But this was not the dominant note in the pre-war debate. When opponents of war said that the risks were too high, the hawks' principal response was not to downplay those risks but to say that the risks of inaction were higher. The public was not sold a bill of goods. Polls showed that most people expected a war to last months, not days. It was possible, of course, to hope that the war would be over in days; but the military devised a plan that would work, and adapt, if it lasted longer.

A related contention is that the war has failed because the Iraqi people have not greeted us as liberators. But nobody predicted that they would do so before we liberated them -- and we have not yet done so. Most ordinary Iraqis do not know whether the regime will go or, if it will, how long it will take. They have lived in a "republic of fear" for decades. Now there is fear and confusion. Most Iraqis are not welcoming us, but they are not actively opposing us either.

Other, more ...