KURTZ: If you're sitting at home watching it on TV, you see mass kidnappings, suicide bombings, mosque bombings, death squads. When you're there as a journalist, does the situation seem as chaotic to you as it does to a viewer?

ROBERTS: You know, Howie, I had a perception of Iraq going in, and it was the first time I'd been there in three-and-a-half years. I got out a couple of days after the Saddam statue fell, after the initial invasion. So it was quite a shock to go back and see the chaotic state that the country was in. And as -- I guess you could say as realistic as my perceptions were about going in there, the reality on the ground far exceeded that.

The place is a mess. It's an absolute mess. There is nowhere you can go in the Baghdad area as a Western journalist without an escort, where you could feel safe from being kidnapped, shot at, whatever. The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level.

I was out riding with a Stryker unit a couple of days after the election. They got the 911 call, an IED attack against an American convoy. This convoy of Humvees had just been driving up the on-ramp on to a highway when one of those formed projectiles hit it.

It literally disintegrated the guy in the passenger seat, who was right there where the projectile came through, killed the driver. I watched him die on the roadside.

And when you look at that from such a personal level, it does affect your perceptions of what's going on on the ground. And I know that that's not everywhere, all the time, but it does suggest that death lurks at every step in Iraq, and any place where death lurks at every step can be in nothing but a state of chaos.

KURTZ: So in a nutshell, you're saying that the coverage -- that the situation in Iraq on the ground, as you saw close up, is worse -- is worse than it appears from the television and newspaper coverage. Why is that? Why are we not capturing the full anarchy there?

ROBERTS: Because television can't -- and even print -- can't fully capture the scope of what's going on in Iraq.

[H]is article contains one of those sentences that, all by itself, shows that the person who wrote it should never be taken seriously again, at least about policy -- a sentence that should take its place in the Pundit Hall of Shame alongside Jonah Goldberg's "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" [paraphrasing the equally execrable Michael Ledeen], or Tom Friedman's "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind". Here it is, in all its glory:

"In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."

Richard Cohen: resign. Resign right now.

November 8, 2006. A decade or so from now when a rational post mortem on the Iraq War is written, rather than the noxious and counterfactual hit pieces churned out by the Washington Post’s allegedly unbiased reporters, this is the day that will be pegged as the day we lost the war. It’s amazing how easy it is to do this in hindsight. I think most historians would agree that June 22, 1941 was the day that Nazi Germany lost the war. Some might quibble and contend it was February 2, 1943. But you can’t get to Stalingrad without Operation BARBAROSSA. You can’t get to Midway or the atom bomb without passing through Pearl Harbor.

The sacking of Don Rumsfeld yesterday will become obvious in the days and weeks to come as the day on which President Bush decided that winning in Iraq was just too much work and the sacrifices made in blood and treasure in Iraq, when stacked up against the forlorn possibility of appeasing the new majorities in the House and Senate, simply do not matter. [ . . . ]

There is no doubt that dissatisfaction with the War in Iraq contributed to the electoral defeat on Tuesday, however that dissatisfaction is rooted an much in the feeling that we are not prosecuting the war vigorously enough as it is in the feeling that we should not be there at all.

President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available.

Conservative: "I don't even understand what the culture wars are about anymore."
Liberal: "Your side hates my side because you think we think you're stupid. My side hates your side because we think you're stupid."

- No matter how many seats the Democrats take in the House it won't be enough to keep the Republican echo chamber from pointing out that it most certainly is not a mandate, while all the time whining about the loss of control of the commitees.

- Joe Lieberman is going to win and it will somehow translate as support for the war and civility and common sense...and nobody in the media will point out what a sleazy campaign he ran.

- There will be at least one upset that the polls didn't predict and that will be held up as evidence that all polls are always wrong...except when they side with your candidate.

[ . . . ]

- Win or lose, George Allen's national aspirations are finished. Fertig! Verfallen! Verlumpt! Verblunget! Verkackt!

- Lots of recounts.

Because I had just two short months in Iraq, I emailed Bailey and Craig back in Washington after several days of inaction. What projects could I begin working on? I wanted to know. Who was in charge here? What could I do to contribute? A day later I received a rather brusque response from Paige Craig. They didn’t have time to deal with my little problems. I needed only to take my lead from Jim Sutton, the country manager, whom I had seen just once during my first week.

But my badgering did seem to pay off. I was soon contacted by a Lincoln Group employee named Jon, who formerly had run political campaigns in Chicago and now worked on the company’s I.O., or Information Operations. Over lunch at the recently bombed and rebuilt Green Zone Café—an air-conditioned tent with plastic chairs and a TV airing Lebanese music videos—Jon explained that he was returning home for several weeks of R & R and that Jim Sutton had chosen me to be his replacement. Jon quickly sketched out my new I.O. responsibilities. An Army team inside the Al Faw palace, another of Saddam’s former residences, would send me news articles they had cobbled together from wire stories and their own reports from the field. It was my job to select the ones that seemed most like Iraqis had written them. I was then to pass these articles along to our Iraqi employees, who would translate the pieces into Arabic and place them in local newspapers. Jon told me that the U.S. Army could hardly carry out this work in their military uniforms, so they hired Lincoln Group, which could operate with far fewer restrictions. It was a bread-and-butter contract, he said, that paid the company about $5 million annually. I asked if the newspapers knew that Lincoln Group or the U.S. military were behind these articles. They did and they didn’t, Jon said. The Iraqis working for us posed as freelance journalists, but they also paid editors at the papers to publish the stories—part of the cost Lincoln Group billed back to the military. “Look,” Jon assured me, “it’s very straightforward. You just have to keep the military happy.”