So I turn this morning to The New York Times op-ed page (with my decaf cappucino, skim, I know not a real cappucino), and I see the headline, "How Not to Inflame Iraq." I begin to read it, since I read too many pieces on Iraq and why should I skip this one? Actually, it is not what you would intellectually call "op-ed," assuming that this genre of writing might be literally op-ed, that is in opposition to Times editorial policy. But for a long time that's been a dream deferred. In any case, the article read like echo of Times policy. And then I get to the bottom of the story, and I find that its author is Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations. No, I am not bitching about the Times being unpatriotic or anything unseemly like that. It's the assumption that lies behind the publication of any article by the Iranian ambassador about anything. I'd feel the same if an article were printed by the Israeli ambassador or by the U.S. ambassador or by George Bush himself. (Wasn't there one published recently by Bush? Maybe it was in The Washington Post.) In any case, the editor knows that in running articles by public officials he is not running articles written by "the author." "The author" may not even have read his article. What the Iranian ambassador says--or the Israeli ambassador, and believe me I don't equate them--may fit into a news dispatch or someone else's analysis. But the piece is generically dishonest. It does not represent an honest person's independent thought on a subject. It is actually propaganda, and probably has gone through so many vettors and censors that it needs to be seen as a piece of government policy not as intellectually free analysis. This is the case for any official anywhere. Is the public arena so impoverished that op-ed pages have to stoop for canned writing? Grovel for it even. Why would the Times or the Post and their imitators elsewhere want to run a piece of a public relations campaign?