On the Hugh Hewitt program Wednesday, I heard Tony Snow stand up for the importance of looking the facts squarely in the face, ignoring ideological and preconceptions, and following them where they lead, most especially on the subject of the Iraq war. He also commended the New York Times and the L.A. Times as good sources of such facts.

Snow is the chief spokester for a White House that has occasionally been accused of seeing the world through ideological lenses, a White House in which an official once accused an uppity reporter of being stuck in the “reality-based community,” and a White House that, on Iraq more than anything else, has been known to notice only the convenient facts and even the convenient unfacts.

But darn it, even while urging war critics to face the facts, Snow gave about as one-sided, selective and at times phantasmagorical presentation of the current facts, especially about how the people of Iraq see the U.S. occupation, as you’d ever hope to see. Here’s the full uninterrupted excerpt (and for even more, here’s the transcript of the whole interview):

Tony Snow: “I think what war critics need to do is to try to find out what the facts are. We kind of know what their early position is, but do you not think when it comes to a matter of national and global security, that maybe your opinion ought to reflect a sensible understanding of what is going on based on reporting on the ground from John Burns of the New York Times, and Mike Gordon in the New York Times, and from people at the L.A. Times, and places that you would not expect to be friendly to the Bush administration.

There have been some extraordinary breakthroughs in Iraq in the recent months, maybe the most extraordinary of which is this. The Iraqi people have said: This is our fight, please help us, let’s go.

They’ve gone after Al Qaida in Anbar Province. They’ve gone after it in Diayala Province. They’ve gone after it in portions of Baghdad. They’ve gone after Shiia militias, they’ve gone after insurgents.

In other words, they have actually begun to grasp something that probably was unthinkable to them. A foreign country came to their soil. We didn’t come to take them over, we didn’t come to kill them, we didn’t come to steal their oil. We came to set them free.

That is something that is so out of the experience of the normal Iraqi that for a long time, it didn’t sink in. But it has begun to sink in. And furthermore, what has begun to sink in that the ultimate goal for American is for the Iraqis to be free, to be the captains of their destiny. So what you’re starting to see now are tribal sheiks, and what you see is a revolution from the ground up. This is not being led by politicians in Baghdad. This is being led by shopkeepers, it’s being led by mothers and fathers and kids who are tired of seeing al Qaida slaughtering family members in an attempt to intimidate them into following al Qaida.

It is an amazing thing, because it demonstrates that the power of an idea now had percolated into the heart of Iraq in a very serious way. And Anbar Province, which had been written off less than a year ago, is now basically a place where al Qaida’s persona non grata, where our Ambassador, Ryan Crocker, was running around in Ramadi the other day, with no body armor on. It indicates to me that something very special is taking place right now.

So if you want to put together a critique of the war, what you need to do is to assemble some of the facts, rather than your predispositions coming in, because ultimately, success in Iraq or success as a superpower depends not on your wishes and not on your hopes and not on your ideology, but on what’s true.”

What think?