James Lindgren of Northwestern Law School has a tremendous op-ed in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. He claims that the media are treating Iraq as though they were covering the New Hampshire primary, "in which a winner is treated as a loser because he did not win by as wide a margin as pundits expected." He reminds us that the protests and lootings in Iraq shouldn’t trouble us overmuch. After all, 200 were killed in Nigeria when a journalist wrote something apparently unflattering to Mohammed; why should we expect order and harmony in the midst of a massive regime change in Iraq?

He concludes: "We need more historical perspective brought to bear on our public debate over the Iraq war and its aftermath, so that our expectations are more reasonable. There is one thing we can all be thankful for: Neither the press nor my equally insightful fellow academics were running the war--or are now running the reconstruction of Iraq."