Billmon steers us to some excellent reporting on Iraq. I’ll single out just one, but do go read the rest:

As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new American team that arrived then, headed by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.

The new team called the departing Americans “the illusionists,” for their conviction that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s medieval brutalism. One American military commander began his first encounter with American reporters by asking, “Well, gentlemen, tell me: Do you think that events here afford us the luxury of hope?”

This is not, however, what John F. Burns and the New Pravda were telling us at the time. Rather, we were treated to tabloid-like coverage of Saddam’s arraignment, cautiously optimistic takes on the transfer of “sovereignty” to CIA puppet Iyad Allawi, and warm and fuzzy profiles of Bremer, which gave us some need-to-know factoids about his passion for gourmet cooking:

[Bremer] boarded a Black Hawk helicopter to begin his journey out of Iraq, and eventually to his house in Vermont, teaching the gourmet cooking classes that are his favorite pastime, and the book on his Iraq experiences that he plans to write.

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.”

For a clearer picture of what’s going on in Iraq now, as opposed to a year ago, I suggest this piece by The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, and this article by ex-diplomat Peter Galbraith in the New York Review of Books.