Yesterday ABC News posted a story about the new State Department report on terrorism. There’s been, it seems, an uptick in global terror victims. From the story:

Most dramatically, there was a 50 percent increase worldwide in suicide bombings last year. All told, 66,995 people were killed or wounded in terror attacks in 2007 (up from 59,327 in 2006 and 39,469 in 2005).

They then break down some of the figures by country and offer this:

“Around the globe people are getting increasingly efficient at killing other people,” said Russ Travers of the National Counterterrorism Center, which compiled the data for the report.

The war on terror has been dispiriting in a number of ways, and even as there’s progress being made, we’re sure to encounter many more unforeseeable setbacks. But we are still very much in a live war. And reading something conclusive into these numbers is disingenuous. It’s like visiting one’s car in the body shop, seeing the pieces scattered about, and determining that the mechanics have made things worse.

The bigger problem lies in the fact that the MSM is so eager to seize upon these figures as confirmation of the Bush administration’s incompetence. In a new piece at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes that we’re winning the war abroad and losing it here:

After years of learning how to fight an unfamiliar war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to protect us at home, we are finally getting most things right. But if our soldiers and intelligence agencies have learned how to win, our politically-correct diplomats and the American consumer haven’t – and are doing as much at home to empower radical Islam as those on the front lines are to defeat it.

As Hanson points out, the U.S. military is making long-awaited and tangible progress. But if news outlets remain obsessed with exploiting the “most dramatically” depressing numbers, ignoring the positives, and looking to diminish every potential gain, then they’ll continue to make the overall fight that much harder.