During a livechat today, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest took a question about whether the media would alert us to impending hostilities against Iran:

Portland, Ore.: In the runup to the Iraq war, the media was pretty good at telling us that the military was preparing for war. The administration said this was to face down Saddam Hussein and scare him into complying with U.N. inspections, but of course it was just to actually do the war. If the administration wants to go to war against Iran, will the press be able to judge the military “posture,” deployments, etc. and inform us again that we are preparing for another war? Or can the administration keep it more secret? Dana Priest: They only thing they have a chance at keeping secret is some kind of air-only or small unit surgical strike. If involves many ground units, then that becomes much more problematic.

If the president launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, then yeah, I suppose it would be pretty hard to keep that out of the papers.