The Bush Administration is trying again to blame bad news from Iraq on reporters. “Dog bites man” isn’t news because it’s such a commonplace event. Isn’t bloodshed in Iraq so commonplace now that another bombing, another kidnapping, another heap of bodies murdered execution-style is all just a big yawn? Isn’t it about time we started to hear about Iraqi supermarket ribbon-cutting ceremonies?

ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz recently moved from covering the Pentagon to covering the White House, and she recently returned from her tenth trip to report from Iraq. On the PBS program Washington Week, she talked about the difference between what she hears at the White House and what she saw in Iraq:

I have to say that I was struck by a disconnect, and the disconnect is this: you hear the administration talk about this in terms of very stark black and white. There’s a few layers they talk about, but it’s good vs. bad; it’s good news vs. bad news; it’s terrorists vs. us. And when you’re there — and this time in particular to me, because I have just started covering the White House — it is so complex over there, and it gets more complex every time I go. There are more enemies. There are different types of enemies. And when you talk about the different types of enemies, it means there are different ways to defeat those enemies.

One of the things I did on this trip is that I vowed to go talk to the Iraqi security forces. Not to talk to the Americans about the Iraqi security forces, but the Iraqi security forces themselves.

I went to Sadr City, a place I’ve visited year after year, and the place where I last was, where American troops were in charge of that area, now there are 1500 Iraqi security forces, with some American trainers, about 36 American trainers.

So I started talking to them. Do you have enough equipment? No, we don’t have enough equipment. Do you have enough armored vehicles? We have no armored vehicles. Our enemy has better weapons than we do. We could be defeated by our enemy.

So I said — and there were a group of about 200 — I said, “So tell me, are you better off now, or before Saddam Hussein was taken down?” And almost all of them raised their hands and said, “We were better off before, because we had security. We have assassinations now, we have murders, we have all these things. We don’t have security.”

Now the irony here, of course, is that these are the people who are supposed to be providing security, and they were scared.

There was an interpreter there who I’d met years ago, who said, “Can you get me out of here? Can you help me get out of here? I have, in my room, I have all the interpreters that have been killed.”

So it’s very complicated over there.

Raddatz was asked whether the current conflict is a civil war.

Are they in a full-blown civil war? I can’t say that. Is the sectarian violence worse than I’ve ever seen it? Absolutely. I don’t know what the tipping point over there is, when you say we’re in a full-blown civil war.

These same Iraqi security forces said to me — the colonel, the one who’s heading all these troops — said, “We’re in a hidden civil war. You don’t even know the half of it.”