"It is easy to catalogue problems, more difficult to provide solutions." This point is not only absolutely true, but lies at the heart of intelligence.

In a world in which opinions are commonplace, there is a rare value in withholding opinions.

The United States' invasion of Iraq was not a great idea. Its only virtue was that it was the best available idea among a series of even worse ideas.

The essential point is that the invasion of Iraq was not and never should have been thought of as an end in itself.

[Since I am not] an ideologue, the nature of the Iraqi government -- or chaos -- does not affect me.

What does affect me is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is trying to kill me.

The key to al Qaeda is in Riyadh and in Islamabad.

Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin.

Another shell filled with mustard gas, possibly also part of an IED was discovered on May 2.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.

A suicide car bombing near an entrance to the coalition headquarters in Baghdad killed the head of the Iraqi Governing Council and three other people today, dealing a further setback to the American effort to stabilize Iraq in advance of a June 30 handover of sovereignty.

"All I could see was a ball of fire rising into the air and there were body parts all around."

The measure of a military force is how honestly errors are addressed and rectified. When a command structure begins denying that self-evident problems are facing them, all is lost.

Remember the objective; respect the enemy; be your own worst critic; exercise leadership at all levels -- these are fundamental principles of warfare. They have all been violated during the Iraq campaign.

From Al Fallujah to An Najaf to Abu Ghraib, the question was whether anyone had the slightest idea what they were trying to achieve in Iraq.

Who is responsible for the failures in Iraq?

Officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war on terrorism began.

As America finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and transience of empire.

"I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."