Johann Hari (via aldaily), no conservative, admits that the American invasion has saved far more lives than it has ended:

The Human Rights Centre (HRC) in Kadhimiya has been set up by Iraqis themselves from the ashes of Baathism. They have been going methodically through the massive - and previously unexplored - archives left by the regime, which document every killing in cold bureaucracy-speak. The HRC have found that if the invasion had not happened, Saddam would have killed 70,000 people in the past year. Not sanctions: Saddam's tyranny alone.

Elsewhere, he quotes an an Iraqi medical student living in London, who recently returned to Iraq:

Sama says: "If we hadn't been to Iraq, we'd be really depressed right now. I came back, saw the news and thought, 'Are they talking about the same Iraq?'" Is this, I wonder, because the media can only deal with Arabs as victims or terrorists?

The IPO members don't think so. Rather, Yasser says, there are several reasons why the reporting from Iraq is stressing the negative over the positive. "First, buildings being bombed is a much better story than the formation of the Baghdad city council to clear up the rubbish and sort out the sewers. Angry Iraqis make a better story than hopeful Iraqis.

"Second, a lot of the media was openly anti-war, so now that there are hundreds of thousands of mass graves being opened up and all the evidences shows that the Iraqis supported [the war], the media are latching on to the few things, like the looting and, of course, the weapons issue – that was always a red herring – that seem to vindicate their position. And third – I know this sounds like a petty point, but it's very important – a lot of journalists are using the same guides and translators that they used before the war, because they know them. They don't seem to realise that those people were carefully selected by the regime because of their loyalty to Saddam's line. So most journalists are getting a totally distorted picture."