Arnett was not telling it "like it is". He was speaking as he saw things. As a journalist he has no way to get his arms around the ground truth.

I don't think it was highly intelligent of him to give an interview to Iraq TV in the first place, but it was even less intelligent to select -- from the range of differnet perspectives flying around -- the semi-defeatist parts and pontificate on them without enough ground truth to speak with any authority.

For example, he said in the interview that it was very clear that the coalition plan had failed and was obviously being redrafted. This is naive, IMO -- while I have no more access to the planning documents than he does, I do know that war plans of the kind he is speaking about are built on wide ranges of outcomes and multiple contingency plans. Knowing this, it is plain his "telling it like it is" was just one selective opinion from one corner of the sand box. Not that we should expect anything else from the chaos of war. The fact that he happened to be in a hotel in Baghdad during Gulf War I may technically qualify him as a veteran reporter but I see no reason to consider him any more of a source of truth than any other reporter over there. The fact is that even the coordination centers and HQs are struggling for information and constantly trying to get more complete pictures of the situation. Let alone an underpriveleged field reporter.

A