Read this!

I've been laid low with a tooth ache and haven't feel like blogging. But now I've got drugs and an appointment for a root canal... I mean, how good does life get? But I digress...

For some time now, I've been waiting (yearning, more like it) for an analysis of the Iraq fiasco -- what I imagine to be an early version of how history will treat this misadventure. Broad in scope but detailed and analytical -- and not something with "an agenda" like Woodward's latest insider's tell-some.

Well, I've just discovered one and it comes in the form of a review of three books. Entitled Iraq: The War of the Imagination it was written by Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books. I was going to provide excerpts but there were too many good ones and it's a long review so I resisted my inclination to quote it in its entirety. So, I'm going to strongly encourage you to read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: It would seem that I am not the only one to have been favourably impressed with this article. Here's Tristero at Digby's:

This article by Mark Danner is a superb summary of the spectacular series of mis-assumptions and downright idiocies that created the unmitigated disaster that is Iraq today. As Danner says several times in the article, some of the mistakes are simply unbelievably basic as, for example, invading and conquering a country without any idea about what to do afterwards.