When I started posting here again a while ago, I had decided to mostly post about books and concerts but I just read an article that deserves a mention - Kenneth Pollack's latest article on Iraq. There have been a lot of criticisms of the Bush government's actions before, during and after the Iraq invasion but this stands out as the clearest, most concise and best backed up explanation of what went wrong with the reconstruction. Pollack has done a lot of writing on Iraq - he wrote both the best case for the invasionand the best explanation of why everyone thought Iraq had WMD when it really didn't. Both of these are excellent examples of well thought out, non-partisan pieces of analysis - something that is generally lacking in the news coverage, the pundits writings and the blogs on Iraq. Anyone who really wants to know what is going on and why things happened the way they did, needs to be familiar with Pollack's research and arguments.