Anybody with a Brain knows this

Except for those WILFULLY maintaining ignorance, for example this guy...



I was going to write about this article in the New York Times, but hell Billmon did so much more with it, that I'll just link to him and highlight this portion:

It would have been nice, if only for a change of pace, if Burns and his fellow correspondents had let their readers know at the time that the "new team" was deeply pessimistic about U.S. propects in Iraq, and already worried about the threat of civil war -- a threat those same officials were dismissing as "beyond the fringe" in their on-the-record briefings.

What Burns has given us, in other words, is a glimpse behind the curtain that divides what reporters in the quasi-official media actually know from what they are willing to say in print or on the air. And what we see looks a hell of a lot like the cozy insider relationships revealed when Patrick Fitzgerald pulled back the curtain on the White House press operation -- or, to use a more accurate metaphor, when he turned over the rock.

I guess we'll have to wait until this time next year to find out what official Baghdad sources are telling the New Pravda now. I'm going to guess it will be something along the lines of: "We knew the civil war had already begun, but we couldn't get anyone in Washington to listen. They were too busy trying to figure out who was leaking what to whom about the Plame investigation."

In Washington the clubby dinner parties and access are everything, one can only imagine that the same things are true in Iraq on a lesser scale, with the added element of maintaining one's personal safety. And John F. Burns is yet one of the better reporters.