Asymmetric war is where one party is not bound by any constraints to its actions, yet continues to use the moral constraints that it's enemy chooses to abide by as a weapon against them. Olavo de Carvalho defines the term and offers concrete examples here:

One example is the unevenness in the treatment given to the occupations in Iraq and Tibet, directed in a way to instill the public with the impression that a temporary military operation - calculated as no other before in history to avoid damages to the civilian population - is a more serious crime than the continuous occupation, the premeditated destruction of a 1000-year-old culture, and the permanent genocide that has already made one million victims.

The media has dubbed themselves the "tactic police", but their condemnations are uniformly directed against a few U.S. Soldiers who did wrong. No credit is given for those doing something right. No time to show the horrors of the former regime or American resolve to improve the lives of the disfigured. Forget any scandal which extended the cruelty against the common Iraqi, unless blame can be attributed to the United States.

I'm not saying that I am against asymmetric participation in this war. I believe that it is right that the coalition is bound by moral values which seek to minimize colateral damage in both lives and infrastructure and defend the people of Iraq. It is good that the recent prison abuses have been exposed and condemned (but not that they have been so sensationalized).

It would just be nice if the press would also notice that although the coalition forces are guilty of an occasional violation of their moral code, the enemy's lack of such violations is explainable not by their stellar behavior but by their lack of such a code.