Jason Vest writes about the disturbing contents of a CPA memo in the Boston Phoenix: Bad days ahead. “But according to a closely held Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo written in early March, the reality isn’t so rosy. Iraq’s chances of seeing democracy succeed, according to the memo’s author – a US government official detailed to the CPA, who wrote this summation of observations he’d made in the field for a senior CPA director – have been severely imperiled by a year’s worth of serious errors on the part of the Pentagon and the CPA, the US-led multinational agency administering Iraq.”

in The Globe and Mail by Doug Saunders has been bugging me ever since. It’s called No way out and in it, Saunders makes a very provocative case. Last Tuesday, “George W. Bush gave one of the strangest and most opaque performances of his presidential career. At the time, for those of us watching, it seemed that he was stubbornly, blindly sticking to his guns, refusing to change his Iraq plans by an angstrom despite terrible failures on the ground. Since then, it has become apparent that something entirely different had happened: The speech was a complete reversal and admission of defeat.”

Go read the article. It is one of the best pieces on the current situation in Iraq that has been published. I think it’s an important article.

Blind Into Baghdad by James Fallows. Great reading.

A Perfectly Good Train Wreck by William Rivers Pitt.

what’s going on in Afghanistan? Christina Lamb of the New Statesman gives us a reality check: The return of the Taliban. “Liberated women? The chief justice wants to ban women from driving. That’s not the only way in which the reality in Afghanistan falls short of US claims.”