Chutzpah Award: The New York Times is accusing soldiers serving in Iraq of participating in propaganda in their orchestrated letters to their home newspapers.

Firm endorsements of the letter's description of the situation in Kirkuk have since been re-registered by most of the soldiers who were supposed to have written letters, but that matters little to anyone who ever marched in the military command system. The Pentagon should nip the form-letter barrage and make sure it is not repeated, if only because it is so counterproductive. Fakery is the worst possible way to answer the public's rising demand for information about the true state of affairs in Iraq.

So, the fact that these letters were sincere expressions from these soldiers doesn't matter. They're still dishonest fakes.

Dictionary.com defines "propaganda" as follows: The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause. It doesn't mean "fake," as the Times implies. I suppose that the Times would be a little tender from its histrionics after the Blair Affair, but it hasn't seemed to have learned much about real ethics. Its coverage of the situation in Iraq is propaganda par excellence, by that definition. The real issue is whether these form letters fairly represent the feelings and views of these soldiers, and I'm convinced that they do.