…had a three-part series in the NYTimes this week on the mistakes we have made in Iraq. I don’t necessarily agree with it all, but it is remarkably fair-minded stuff. It is notable especially for the fact that the James Fallows argument that everything went wrong in Iraq because the State Department was ignored is entirely absent. This piece picks up on a major theme that I wrote about in my piece–that our flawed intelligence about the post-war was as bad as our flawed intelligence about WMD. This is, of course, disturbing and argues for real intelligence reform, but it also discredits the idea that it was rosy-scenario civilians in the Pentagon who bull-headedly underestimated the difficulties of re-building Iraq.