On April 11, 2003, the Daily Mail's Don Surber crowed about the fall of Baghdad, "Opponents of this war will never admit their error... Critics could not wait to blast the war plan. They should have. It worked."

A week later, April 18, 2003, he wrote about the financial costs of the war, "Critics even got the price wrong. They said it would cost more than $80 billion. So far it has cost $20 billion and it might cost another $10 billion in the next six months."

Meanwhile the war's monetary costs have skyrocketed toward $280 billion, and the term "quagmire" seems increasingly apt.

If his earlier misperceptions concern him now, Surber hasn't mentioned it to the rest of us.

On Jan. 22, he reiterated the administration's "it's all about freedom" rationale for the war. "A free world is a safe world. That is why we fight."

What about the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction? Many of us do not agree that the reasons to go to war are interchangeable.

Surber concluded his column that day, in part, by terming "ingrates" those who possess the temerity to point out that no weapons of mass destruction were found. Why "ingrates"?

It would benefit his readers if Surber would do some additional fact-checking, whether writing about war or other matters.

On Jan. 21, he wrote: "But what is annoying is that when trouble comes, the world expects the United States to take care of it unilaterally and without being asked. Consider the recent tsunami."

In fact, however, the Bush administration had to be shamed into upping its initial pledge of $15 million, first to $35 million and then to $350 million, as country after country offered more than we did in tsunami relief.

There is more.

Surber berated Sen. Jay Rockefeller in his Nov. 7, 2003, column. Rockefeller's staff had circulated a memo detailing methods to question Bush administration officials to political advantage.

Surber wrote that Rockefeller's approach amounted to, "...tying up officials in time of war." He added that Rockefeller was using America's intelligence gatherers for opposition research.

Surber wrote: "Rockefeller owes every agent in each intelligence agency an apology for allowing partisanship to blind him from his duty."

But what prevented Surber from similarly condemning the White House's outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame?

Plame's husband is the diplomat who had angered the White House by coming forward to say that Bush's claim of a Niger-Iraq yellowcake connection was a fraud.

According to Robert Novak, someone in the White House revealed Plame's name to him. Novak then disclosed her name in the New York Times.

Thus, the White House had ruined any further possibility that Plame could gather further intelligence that might have saved the lives of American troops.

Returning to the column of April 11, 2003, Surber wrote of our troops' triumphant storming of Baghdad: "As the statue fell, dictators around the globe lost their appetite for terrorism."

But on Jan. 30, the Gazette-Mail carried a front page story by Paul Haven of the Associated Press that began:

"The war in Iraq has become a homing beacon for Islamic militancy, threatening to destabilize neighboring countries and embolden terrorists to attack elsewhere, a senior RAND Corp. analyst told business and political elites at the World Economic Forum Saturday."

If there is a positive side to this critique of Surber, it is that he is being read. He is provoking some critical analysis of precisely the type to which he evidently aspires.

Wyatt is a professor of psychology at Marshall University in Huntington.

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