President Bush and his primary surrogates—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney—constantly complain about unfavorable news coverage of administration efforts in Iraq. Bush told one reporter recently, “There’s a sense that people in America are not getting the truth.”

If that’s true, it’s certainly not because the White House has been short on spin doctors or gullible journalists. A study by Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) covering the first three weeks of the war showed that official government voices, past and present, accounted for 63 percent of all sources used by major news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX and PBS.

“Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war,” FAIR discovered. “Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war, with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases 25 to 1.”

So, it’s not so much that Bush can’t get his version of the "truth” out. Rather, it’s the quagmire itself that has caused support for the war to tumble.

On one of his carping sprees, Colin Powell told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that there was “no doubt whatsoever” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion in March. Yet, no weapons have been discovered and Powell still refuses to retract his charge.

On ABC’s “This Week” two months ago, Secretary Powell asserted that the Clinton administration “conducted a four-day bombing campaign in late 1998 based on the intelligence that he had. That resulted in the weapons inspectors being thrown out.” In its coverage of the Powell interview, “The New York Times” allowed that false assertion to go unchallenged.

Three years earlier, it had corrected a similar lapse. On Feb. 2, 2000, it acknowledged, “A front-page article yesterday…on Iraq misstated the circumstances under which international weapons inspectors left that country before American and British air strikes in December 1998. While Iraq had ceased cooperating with the inspectors, it did not expel them. The United Nations withdrew them before their air strikes began.” The strikes began that night.

There were other pretexts for invading Iraq—such as the administration’s bogus assertion that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger—that were not a result of the Bush administration’s failure to get its message out. They got that message out, but like so many other assertions, we’ve since discovered, it was untrue.

The truth is that this was an ill-conceived, ill-timed war that has produced disastrous consequences for Americans without any clear assurance that it will better protect us from terrorists. According to a recent analysis of military fatalities by Reuters News Service, the American death toll after eight months in Iraq has exceeded the number of U.S. soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War. With the soldiers in Saturday’s midair helicopter crash in the northern city of Mosul, the Iraq death toll climbed to 417.

During the Vietnam War, which officially commenced on Dec. 11, 1961, there were 392 U.S. deaths in those first three months. The peak year was 1968, when 1,926 Americans died in Vietnam.

Rather than dealing forthrightly with this unacceptably high American death rate in Iraq, Bush prefers to concentrate on imagery that he hopes will make his administration look better. Thus, his decision not to attend any of the funerals for soldiers killed abroad as many of his predecessors have done. He also broke custom by enforcing a prohibition on journalists photographing or filming soldiers’ caskets as they leave from or return to U.S. military bases.

With no thanks to Bush, Americans are learning the truth. For example, they are leaning that this administration is no friend of veterans. Bush’s most recent budget would increase prescription drugs costs for vets earning more than $24,000 a year. Bush has done nothing to eliminate the backlog to see a doctor at VA hospitals, which can range from six months to two years. The Bush budget would reduce money that helps military children receive a quality education. Over the objection of veterans groups, the administration has announced a decision to close seven VA hospitals.

The problem for Bush is not that “people in America are not getting the truth.” Rather, it’s the truth itself.