Trying to know the unknowable ...

"Jay Rosen, when pressed, has argued that both the doves have facts, and the hawks are operating from a different set of facts, and that is why the two tribes cannot communicate.

That cannot be true. No one is entitled to their own facts, and facts is facts. Some of them are harder to pin down than others, but even if you limit yourself to discussing facts that are beyond serious dispute (The US has found hundreds of WMDs buried in the desert, Iraq was developing missiles that violated the terms of the cease fire and UNSC resolutions, and that the 9/11 commissioners found that there were, in fact, connections with Al Qaeda) those facts falsify large swathes of the dovish argument.)

These facts, while apparently difficult for some of the more intellectually dishonest of us to accept, are very easy to know, and to grasp.

But if the confusion over Captain Jamil Hussein has demonstrated anything, it is that it is exceedingly difficult to "know" any one thing in Iraq. The reporter's task - the honest reporter's task - and I have to believe that there are a few left out there, is incredibly difficult.

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