Civil War, What Civil War?

Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post that the NYT campaign of disinformation concerning a civil war in Iraq, intended to encourage its Dem readership, is just another one of the BIG LIES the pre-eminent mainstream media PRAVDA disseminates on a daily basis. Peters starts with tongue in cheek:

I'M trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills

Peters is not so kind with his NYT journalist colleagues:

So why were we told that Iraq was irreversibly in the throes of civil war when it wasn't remotely true? I think the answers are straightforward. First, of course, some parties in the West are anxious to believe the worst about Iraq. They've staked their reputations on Iraq's failure.

But there's no way we can let irresponsible journalists off the hook - or their parent organizations. Many journalists are, indeed, brave and conscientious; yet some in Baghdad - working for "prestigious" publications - aren't out on the city streets the way they pretend to be.

They're safe in their enclaves, protected by hired guns, complaining that it's too dangerous out on the streets. They're only in Baghdad for the byline, and they might as well let their Iraqi employees phone it in to the States. Whenever you see a column filed from Baghdad by a semi-celeb journalist with a "contribution" by a local Iraqi, it means this: The Iraqi went out and got the story, while the journalist stayed in his or her room.

Maybe the reason John Burns doesn't get as many bylines now in the NYT lies in the fact that his reporting is much more positive and factual, two of the Grey Lady's no-no's in reporting from Baghdad, unless the facts are negative, of course! You see, the political commissars at the NYT have an agenda:

And the Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Americans don't pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad.

And here is the bottom line, something you would not read in the tabloid-level NYT:

Instead of a civil war, something very different happened because of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The fanatic attempt to stir up Sunni-vs.-Shia strife, and the subsequent spate of violent attacks, caused popular support for the U.S. presence to spike upward.

I hope the blogosphere bumps this up into the national dialogue, because the US MSM are a Fifth Column for Islamic Terrorism's victory over democracy.