May I offer a suggestion for Stephen Spruiell, whose media blog I greatly enjoy and admire?

Deconstruct yesterday’s Washington Post lede story: “Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi” a ludicrous attempt to create a scandal out of the U.S. military trying to drive some fairly obvious messages to the media – media that are routinely manipulated by the terrorists (who are almost never called terrorists of course, no matter what atrocities they commit).

I was particularly struck by the story’s claim that “internal military documents …state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners.”

Ah, yes. There the Pentagon goes encouraging xenophobia. And how clever of them to deduce there was no way Iraqis, on their own, would have felt anything but affection for Zarqawi. If not for what the Post calls a “propaganda campaign,” Iraqis would view Zarqawi’s dispatching of suicide bombers to murder their friends and family as just one of those eccentricities you have to put up with in some friends.

The piece also quotes a colonel saying that al-Qaeda members remain “a very small part of the actual numbers” of insurgent attacks, suggesting that the U.S. military’s communications effort is dishonest.

This ignores the fact that al Qaeda members are disproportionately the ones carrying out suicide bombings, since more secular Baathist insurgents don’t buy the 72 brown-eyed virgins routine. It also ignores the fact that suicide bombings, along with roadside bombings, are the major form of attack (along with decapitations, also an al-Qaeda specialty) in this war. Such attacks are what get the bulk of the media play.

It’s not like non-al-Qaeda insurgents have been mounting ground-and-air assaults on cities and airports.