RedState.com's Jeff Emanuel has an amazing story in the American Spectator about an al Qaeda attempt to kidnap four American paratroopers that coincided with David Petraeus's congressional testimony. As Bryan at HotAir notes, the effect (at least in the mainstream media) would have been like Tet. On stilts.

The four soldiers thwarted the attack, two of them losing their lives in the process:

According to the available evidence, nearly 40 al Qaeda were directly involved in the assault on Reaper's position (they believed the team on the roof comprised nearly a dozen American soldiers). During the firefight, which lasted less than ten total minutes, Corriveau and Moser had killed at least ten enemy fighters -- possibly as many as fifteen -- and had not only kept themselves alive, but, against all odds, had prevented al Qaeda from succeeding in their real goal: to kidnap the soldiers on the rooftop, and to make a public spectacle of their imprisonment and murder, just two weeks before General Petraeus's internationally viewed testimony on Iraq before the U.S. Congress. The suspicion that kidnapping was the fighters' intent was confirmed by a final piece of intelligence that Charlie Company received just after the incident: an announcement, crafted by the Islamic State of Iraq (al Qaeda's Iraqi front), stating that nine U.S. soldiers had been kidnapped in Samarra, and had been beheaded and had their bodies thrown into Thar-Thar lake (to the southwest of the city).

Ladies and gentlemen, these are our soldiers in Iraq, and this is the job they're doing. Now someone go tell the editors at the New Republic. And someone else go tell the people in Hollywood, who think they're telling truth to power by making unnwatchable (and unwatched) movies like "Rendition."