Remember Stockholm Syndrome? It was called that after some hostages taken in the course of a bank robbery in Sweden in 1973 began, over quite a short time, to display a marked sympathy for their captors. Patty Hearst was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome when she robbed banks with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army who kidnapped her.

Now meet Baghdad Syndrome. That is the tendency of journalists who cover murderous tyrants to become sympathetic to their cause, to overlook and refuse to admit the truth of their most hideous crimes. There's a lot of that Syndrome going around at the moment.

Try this little experiment: Do a Google search on two suddenly very fashionable words, 'Iraq Quagmire'. When I did that last week, I got nearly 47,000 hits. By now, that number might well have climbed. I did not read all 47,000, so strictly speaking, I shouldn't be drawing general inferences. But I did read six of them at random, and I came to this narrow conclusion - all six were written by hand-wringing ninnies.

We shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. Abraham Lincoln suffered from the same public fear of a descent into quagmire a few months before the Civil War ended. A Presidential election loomed, and media doom-and-gloom from the battlefield was so bad that people began to talk of a presidency under his rival, George McClellan, and a brokered armistice between North and South. It wasn't until Sherman took Atlanta that the mood changed, and then the war was over in six months.

After the end of Second World War hostilities, many Allied troops were killed by postwar German resistance, a little like that going on in Iraq now, and there was the same sort of criticism of lack of progress in getting Germany into recovery mode as there is now with Iraq. The pleasant thing this time around is that new modes of communication, like e-mail, make it difficult for those who wish for failure to be the only voices heard.

To give an example, some in Bermuda might have read a story in the Times of London the other day, in which a reporter painted an alarming picture of conditions at a prisoner holding facility. Not long afterwards, a young military intelligence analyst helping debrief prisoners at the site the reporter visited, set the record a little straighter with an e-mail to a friend, who published it on his web site.

"The only words for the journalist's work are wilful deception, misrepresentation of information and deliberate intellectual sabotage... His account of living conditions for prisoners was almost laughable. He attempted to paint a picture of misery and abuse through his description.

"You know what? He may have been right... but there are several hundred thousand American and Allied soldiers living in the same conditions, or worse, that he cares absolutely nothing about. Spoken of are prisoners who are held in tents with temperatures reaching 'up to 122 degrees' with no relief.

"There's a reason why it's 122 degrees inside the tent, and that's because the outside ambient temperature is 131, and there are precisely the same temperatures in my tent, and every soldier's tent in this country. I know well what it is to wake up in the morning lying in a pool of sweat that the taut material of my cot cannot absorb...

"There is no other army in the world which goes to such great lengths as we to provide humane treatment to those we were prepared to unflinchingly slay in the midst of combat, and to those who believe our very compassion is one of our failing weaknesses... We have sacrificed to allow the prisoners to live in some cases even better than ourselves, and yet one reads almost daily these fraudulent, slanderous, malignant claims of abuse and malicious twisting of the facts."

At the Media Research Centre, one of those US watchdog groups, columnist L Brent Bozell III blames television more than the print media. "For most of the post-war period," he wrote last week, "the networks have sold us failure... failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Failure to work with do-nothings at the United Nations. Failure to restore water and electricity supplies even as saboteurs seek to undo every good deed. Failure to anticipate that snipers would be paid to shoot our soldiers in the neck while they buy a soda. Failure to create Iraqi democracy out of thin air within two weeks. Failure to keep sixteen dubious words out of the State of the Union address. Failure to nab Saddam or his odious sons.

"But what happens when one of those failures turns upside down into a success, as in killing Uday and Qusay? Easy. More failures. Failure to capture the sons alive for their intelligence value. Failure to understand that Iraqis need to see their corpses. Failure to understand that Iraqis don't like to see corpses preserved. Eleanor Clift (a contributing editor at Newsweek) even suggested the failure to keep Saddam's sons alive was in order to cover up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction - failure squared."

The deaths of Qusay and Uday were correctly painted by many as a turning point for Allied Forces in Iraq. They removed fear of retribution by this unholy pair from the equation in Iraq. Their deaths showed that they were not, as many were beginning to think, so smart... so divinely blessed, perhaps... that they were able to outfox the slow-witted US military at every turn.

They demonstrated that the Hussein family particularly, and their regime in a more general sense, really are not able to resist the power of the Allies and their desire for a free Iraq. Their deaths allowed the Americans an opportunity to pay some reward money out in a hurry, so as to demonstrate that the other rewards they're offering are on the level.

Most important of all, they demonstrated that the Iraqi people are entitled to hope - something there hasn't been a lot of in that country for decades. The benefits of getting rid of these two were not hard to see. Yet even then, the reaction from the rest of the world was very mixed. Many, ignoring both the state of hostilities that exists between Saddam Hussein's regime and Coalition troops and the circumstances of the firefight in which they died, claimed it was illegal to have killed them.

Many, as Brent Bozell said, claimed they should have been captured for their intelligence value. And one journalist, Patrick Graham of the Observer in England, wrote about his nostalgia for the days when Qusay and Uday were alive - how much of the stories about them were true, he said, and how much was myth and propaganda, would probably never be known. "Suffice to say, he (Uday) was a spoilt kid with psychotic tendencies and enormous power..."

A spoilt kid with psychotic tendencies? That takes the cake! What has happened to the concept of evil in this world? Do we no longer recognise it? Doesn't evil matter to us any more? Have we so completely rationalised crime and psychosis that evil has become invisible to us?

Back in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz met with the 20 members of the new city council of Najaf, the holy city of Shiite Islam, when he toured Iraq last month. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal was with him, and described this scene: "Their chairs are arrayed in a circle... The first man to speak wants to know two things: There's a US election next year, and if President Bush loses will the Americans go home?

"And second, are you secretly holding Saddam Hussein in custody as a way to intimidate us with the fear that he might return?"

Mr. Gigot puts that down to the complicated anxiety of the post-Saddam Iraqi mind. I put it down to the post-Saddam mind pinching itself to make sure its good fortune isn't just a dream. Mr. Wolfowitz is upbeat about progress in Iraq. "It strikes me," he said, "that in many ways, Iraqis are like prisoners who have emerged from years of solitary confinement with no light, no news, no knowledge of the outside world, and they have just emerged into the blinding sun and the fresh air of freedom."

I think what he means is that we must be a little forgiving if they do not behave in a completely rational way for a while. Meantime, who could have been watching events in Iraq over the last few days who would not have begun to feel that things were beginning to look up? Exempt those who hope for failure, of course.

gshorto@ibl.bm