We all laugh at those silly Middle Easterners and their grasp on reality. Heroic Iraqis are rebuffing American infidels! How could anyone to take seriously this absurd mythmaking, which was demonstrably untrue? Thank goodness we in the West have a better grasp on reality.

Ahem....

"I have to take my hat off to that young Jessica Lynch because she went through hell," a World War II veteran, John Cook, told an A&E interviewer. "A lot more hell than I did in my 34 months."

Mr. Cook, captured at Bataan, was among 513 P.O.W.'s rescued from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines by American Rangers in 1945.

Even Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who spent five and a half years as a P.O.W. in Vietnam — three of them in solitary confinement — was undone by Private Lynch's suffering. "Her story is the story of the bravest Americans," Senator McCain told A&E.

That's from a New York Times review of the A&E documentary "Saving Jessica Lynch." The reality, of course, as reported by The Washington Post and The Times of London, is that Lynch's captivity -- over in a matter of days -- was essentially a hospital stay in the care of concerned doctors, and her rescuers faced no resistance at the hospital. It doesn't sound like fun, but go read the description of McCain's captivity in Robert Timberg's book The Nightingale's Song if you want to know what "going through hell" is really like.

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By the way, Prof. Dr. Dr. Glenn InstaPundit Reynolds, in his MSNBC blog, wrote smugly on April 8,

The latest Iraqi claim I could find was for 500 civilian casualties and it’s almost surely inflated. Various antiwar groups are claiming to keep count, but their numbers, as several different commentators have observed, appear to be bogus. So I think it’s very possible that Iraqi civilian casualties, too, will turn out to be under 500.

Please note that, according to the Washington Post article on Pfc. Lynch, some doctors at the hospital where she was treated have an estimate that almost certainly contradicts this:

The doctors at Nasiriyah's public hospital said they welcomed the U.S. and British invasion for having toppled Hussein's government. But that support is tempered by the high number of civilian casualties in Nasiriyah. Many of them, including women and children, remain in the crowded wards, suffering from severed limbs and deep lacerations the doctors said were caused by U.S. tank fire and bombs during the first week of the war.

Doctors said they have no exact documentation, but estimated that 300 civilians were killed in Nasiriyah and 1,000 people were wounded.

That's in Nasiriyah alone.