Henry Kissinger: Says a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq wouldn’t work. And as proof, he summarizes his view of the entire Vietnam War.

Hyper-active Hyperlinks: Newspapers are getting (slowly) more adept at embedding hyperlinks into online stories — but we can’t remember the last time we saw an LAT writer link to a story he wrote for another publication, as Michael McGough does today. Let’s just hope Ned Parker doesn’t follow this trend. His pieces for Narrative Magazine.com were long

Fox Goes Further Down the Rabbit Hole: Apparently unsated by its purchase of MySpace, News Corp. bought two young amateur video companies for a combined $270 million. Yep. Two hundred seventy million dollars so that Fox could own your home movies.

As the LAT announces another round of layoffs, the New York Times is raiding the LAT’s Baghdad bureau like some kind of pasty-faced, black-clad insurgency.

It already hired Alissa Rubin away a few months ago. Now those islanders are poised to pick off Solomon Moore, the acclaimed former Baghdad bureau chief who has been on hiatus back in the states. Moore, after more than a decade at the LAT, reportedly is going to take an LA-based job covering the criminal justice system.

One saving grace for the LAT: it recently hired Ned Parker from the Times of London, who has drawn on more than four years of covering the Iraq war to break stories about a secret Shiite-run intelligence agency, terrorist recruitment in U.S. detention camps and fissures in Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia.

Put a few extra body guards on that Ned guy. We hear the NYT’s “Shock and Awe” campaign has just begun.

The Los Angeles Times is pretty pleased about their Baghdad bureau. From Marjorie Miller’s memo to the troops:

I want to take this opportunity to thank BORZOU DARAGAHI, SOLOMON MOORE and LOUISE ROUG for their outstanding work in our Baghdad bureau. We had a
truly remarkable year in 2006 with a wonderful mix of news, analysis, investigative stories and features. We were out front on death squads and the fact that the country had descended into civil war. We had a detailed reconstruction of neighbor-on-neighbor killings in Balad, a heart-breaking account of a family coping with the loss of a child, and a ground-breaking piece by one of our Iraqi staffers, recounting his own dehumanization as he watched the shooting of a man in front of him and did nothing to help.

After reading this, who would want to cover school board meetings?

But all good things must come to an end, and Tina Susman, Alex Zavis and Ned Parker will be taking over in Baghdad.

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