"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said (New York Times, Nov. 22).

Has it come to this? George Bush waving his antennae at the Russian people, holding up a set of splayed fingers and saying, "We mean you no harm!"

This was among the many absurdities accompanying the recent meeting between Bush and Vladimir Putin, not the least of which being the location – Tsarskoye Selo.

Given the increasingly hereditary nature of the American succession and the obviously tsarist leanings of the current First Face, this kind of imagery ought to be very striking to the casual or even the professional observer.

But the only registered blip on the media radar screen was an explanation in Izvestia that the meeting had to be done there because of some strange issue involving an airstrip:

"About 10 days later, State Department officers set off for Russia's Northwest to find a place for the U.S. president's plane to land. Nothing was found close to St. Petersburg. But, ultimately, Tsarskoye Selo was a spot perfectly suitable for a ‘royal' agenda."

This was a small issue surrounding the summit. Some of the larger ones went completely unreported, at least in the American press.

Most of those, from where I sat, involved the final negotiations over Russia's asking price or support for the recent bogus U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq – clearly the central focus of these meetings. Aside even from the obvious idiocies in our Iraq war coverage – the sudden media concern with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction some 15 years after Hussein used such weapons, with our support, against Iran – there have been a number of extremely bizarre features of our wartime media mobilization. Not the least of these have been the surprisingly frank public discussions about the actual reasons for the war, held simultaneously with the utterly fraudulent "official" explanations for the attack.

It is not unusual in the States these days to see a major network run sober reports about Iraqi secret weapons sites and then, minutes later, run an in-depth feature about Iraqi oil and the eventual carving up of the petro-spoils among the postwar victors.

This schizophrenic approach was demonstrated most graphically recently by the Microsoft/NBC/Newsweek/ Washington Post conglomerate, which has created an entire full-length feature series, run on its MSNBC network, entitled: "Oil: The Other Iraq War." In it, the network – which in its day job runs the usual "Weapons Inspectors Arrive in Iraq" schlock as the meat of its "straight" coverage of the war – reports at length about the energy motives behind the attack.

A recent piece called "Oil After Saddam: All Bets Are In" put the matter succinctly:

"The American campaign to overthrow Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, even as al-Qaida's terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What's really motivating Washing-ton to take on Saddam?"

The answer, the network concludes, is oil. And, for the rest of this "Other War" coverage, MSNBC reports on the upcoming conflict with more-or-less total candor, explaining the rewards the United States will reap when it takes control of the world's second-largest oil reserves, etc.

The whole thing leaves one with the odd impression that the media is actually covering two completely different wars: One, the fake one to fictionally disarm a fake dangerous sponsor of international terrorism, and the "other war," the actual one.

The coverage of the first war is suitably fake; the coverage of the second war, because it is real, is suitably real.

The phenomenon reminds me a lot of a book called "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst," about a sailor who once tried to fake a single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. Crowhurst went insane during the voyage and, after a short while, began to keep two separate captain's logs.

The first was the fake one, for posterity, which depicted the captain in all sorts of heroic poses, eating flying fish and composing lyrical descriptions of sunsets as he conquered the raging waters off Cape Horn.

The second log was the real one, intended for use by Crowhurst himself, where he described his actual location floating aimlessly a few hundred miles from the starting port in England, wondering aloud how to work his compass and fretting over the likelihood that he will be found out when he returns home.

There are so many disturbing parallels to the Iraq coverage here that it boggles the mind, especially when you consider that in the Crowhurst story the two-log system only made sense to an insane person who eventually jumped overboard to his death following a complete mental short-out. We lay consumers of the wartime media may yet suffer the same fate.

That said, it is obvious that the American media is not yet completely comfortable with the two-war model. If it had been, some of the news from the recent Bush-Putin summit would have been reported differently. For instance: Just as Bush was meeting with Putin, the United States announced that it was going to expand its quota for imported slab steel from Russia.

Last year, to great fanfare and international outcry, the allegedly anti-protectionist Bush administration slapped 30-percent tariffs on imported slab steel, limiting Russia to 1 million metric tons of imports. Last week, it expanded that number to 1.3 million metric tons.

If, like most thinking people, you heard a distinct cash-register "kerching!" sound coming from the general direction of the Kremlin when Putin signed off on the U.N. Iraq resolution, you might naturally think that deals like this would be the form the payoff would come in.

After all, Russia's steel barons are major patrons of the Putin regime, and Putin's first order of business in gouging the United States would normally be the securing of a bone to throw in their direction.

But this obvious quid pro quo was not detected in the coverage either of the summit or the deal. Indeed, not a single news outlet has even suggested a connection.

Worse still, Izvestia reported that Bush and Putin came to a "gentlemen's agreement" about Russia's share of the oil booty following the war. Aside from a write-up on the BBC's online service, this, too, went unreported.

Instead, acres of text went to describing the "genuine" relationship between the two men. What a crock. Putin and Bush love each other about as much as Henry VIII loved Catherine of Aragon. Royal marriages are always unions of convenience – then and now.

The real love stories are not for posterity.