I’m on the road, Andy, so my response will be brief. Please forgive me if I miss any of your points. Regarding a bill of rights: I disagree with you. We squandered momentum. In the heady days after Saddam’s fall when, yes, we were greeted with flowers and candies, Iraqis were awaiting decisions and signs that life would be better. The Badr Corp and Jaysh al-Mahdi were not yet organized. Where the CPA went wrong consistently was not laying a template that would further liberalism. For example, we could have implemented a budgetary process that would, in effect, rely on each of the 18 governorate to make their decisions and forward that to the central government. This would have made administrative federalism the default and made ethno-sectarian federalism harder to implement. Had we created new rights with a bill of rights–and, the Iraqis at the time would have embraced it–we and the Iraqi liberals could have made more clear how the insurgents and the militias sought to take away rights. As it is now, the militias claim to be thr protector of Iraqi freedom, and the US diplomats make no effective response. I’ll address the culture and religion issue in a later post. I’m in a green room for a CNN hit and have just gotten called.