Crap. Other people get all of the good assignments.

The CNN Factor (washingtonpost.com) "This was the world's first $100 billion television commercial," says a business executive I know. "President Bush and his team couldn't get the message across on al-Jazeera or Egyptian television. This is Uncle Sam's way of buying airtime to tell Iraq that change in an iron fist is coming."

In this sense the journalistic "embeds" and the media at large are not "a weapon of war" for the Pentagon, as an op-ed writer claimed in the New York Times on Tuesday in egregious overstatement, but a method of trying to avert destruction. It has not worked instantly. But that does not mean it will not eventually, or should not have been tried.