Author/columnist Richard Miniter asks why the news of the capture of Iranian military officers in Iraq (who weren't there training the Iraq Army or police) isn't plastered across the front pages of American newspapers and the lead story on the network newscasts.

But this is far more than a cross-border spat. Evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Iraq war is overwhelming. In the past two months, U.S. forces have seized caches of brand-new small arms of Iranian manufacture. That’s right, new guns just off the assembly line in Iran. What are they doing in Iraq? Iran’s state-run radio has admitted for years that it holds “under house arrest” more than 500 al Qaeda operatives—but refuses to turn them over. U.S. military intelligence has long complained that Iran is used as a transit point for al Qaeda (including the recently slain Omar al-Farouq, al Qaeda’s mover of money and men in Basra) and other enemies of democracy in Iraq. Saad bin Laden, Osama’s oldest son, now lives in Iran and is married to a daughter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general. And so on.

Iraq is not in civil war. It is being torn apart by a proxy war waged by Iran and its puppet Syria. These arrests—indeed this story—should be front page news. Instead, it doesn’t even make the front page of the New York Times’ web site.

Why aren’t our media elites interested? I am no mind reader, but I am a reader. I recall a raft of articles in the New Yorker, the Nation and the New York Times predicting or fearing that Iran was next on Bush’s list. Why tell the public that Iran is the reason we are bleeding in Iraq and that we cannot honorably leave until Iran ceases interfering in the affairs of its Arab neighbor? That means regime change in Iran. And that is not on the Times’ agenda.

Well, Miniter has answered his own question. If the media were to seriously report on this story and demand a "solution" to this problem as they have with the al Qaeda- and Baathist-backed violence in Iraq, then the answer would be clear: We need to, at the very least, do some strategic bombing of Iran. That's the last thing in the world the liberal left media wants to be encouraging President Bush to do.