a piece by Dexter Filkins, who writes for the paper from Iraq, comparing now with then. "During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic." Small wonder then that, before he died, Halberstam himself "did not hesitate to compare America's predicament in Iraq to its defeat in Vietnam. And he was not afraid to admit that his views on Iraq had been influenced by his experience in the earlier war. 'I just never thought it was going to work atall,' Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January." Yet neither Halberstam nor Mr. Filkins mentions one crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq. In Vietnam, the enemy was militarily formidable even without any assistance from the media. In Iraq, the enemy is militarily weak and can hope to win only by exploiting the media's negativity--and the continuing romance of their role in Vietnam--to make the war seem unwinnable. The role of fearless truth-teller is no longer available, if it ever was. Like it or not, the media are already involved in the action and must pick a side.

Excactly right.

Incidentally, Bowman's piece was originally printed in the New Criterion, a lesser-known but superb conservative journal that is one of my favorite intellectual magazines.