David Brooks, senior editor

If you had read the American press last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, you would have thought the media analysts were covering Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. There were ludicrous Vietnam comparisons, rampant quagmire forebodings and learned deconstructions of What Went Wrong.

Of course the press is generally over-critical, as part of our constant and pathetic efforts to prove that we are smarter than whoever it is we happen to be covering. But in this case the pundits seemed shocked that the Iraqi Gestapo actually had the audacity to shoot back. And the gloom was reinforced by the anti-war sentiment that prevails in the press rooms. Every flaw in the war-plan set off another round of we-told-you-so gloating.

But the media types were positively sober compared with the Pentagon bureaucrats. Before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, had offended many of them with his rough and sometimes hamfisted effort to modernize the military. Rumsfeld cut the budgets of certain units, especially in the army, to transfer money to high-tech weapons. With the war inexplicably not over in three days, these fuming desk jockey warriors took their revenge, filling the Washington Post and the New Yorker with anonymous quotations about how Rumsfeld was an idiot and the war planning had been botched.

This defeatist tone in the press simply proved unsustainable day after day as the coalition forces seemed to be bungling their way straight into Baghdad. Iraqi crowds sometimes grew exuberantly pro-American as the Baath secret police vanished. An Iraqi civilian in Najaf exulted, "Democracy! Whiskey! And Sexy!" giving the war its first great slogan. Members of the commentariat began to realize that once again they'd gone off the pessimistic deep end.

But that's not the only reason the American mood has picked up over the past few days. In the first place, President Saddam Hussein's regime revealed its true nature. In Britain, Tony Blair has long emphasiaed the monstrous cruelty of the Baath regime. But for reasons that are unfathomable, the Bush Administration has never really made the moral case against Saddam. So the American people are only now seeing the granular reality of his evil, the violation of all norms of decent behavior, the torture chambers, the essential totalitarian nature of his regime. Now it seems ludicrous to think that this regime was ever going to sit down with the genial Hans Blix and negotiate away its weapons.

When U.S. troops are interviewed, they never talk about weapons of mass destruction. They talk idealistically and nobly about ending the suffering of Iraqi people. This refrain has had an effect at home.