"Very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong."

"Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in."

"I am regretful that this has happened."

"... we are still trying to determine what went wrong ..."

"It's a very big mistake. And we are not happy about this big mistake."

It has been a historic few days. We have been reminded of a simpler time.

Mourners include those who are looking for answers to the pressing questions being asked in our country today.

They seem to be asking, What can we do about our country now?

Ronald Reagan embodied the great paradox that is America: wonderful ideals, yet a willingness to pursue policies that go against those ideals. Sadly we see the same gap between rhetoric and policy today.

Margaret Thatcher's attendance at Reagan's funeral is a poignant and important reminder of the special relationship between the United States and Britain and the ability of these Western liberal democracies to confront and defeat the evil of their times.

As the United States signs a new free trade agreement with Morocco next week, we need to recognize the full mosaic of interests at stake.

In Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain and elsewhere, young leaders are struggling for the soul of Islam.

America's strategic interest in the outcome of this struggle is immense, but our ability to influence it is limited.

Mid-60's popular radio was a welter of youthful voices, just as it is now. But every now and then a disc jockey would work Ray Charles, who died on Thursday, into the rotation, and it was like hearing directly from Father Time.

He was singing many of the same words as the bands I listened to, but he meant something entirely different.

You could hear the country and the city in his songs.

In the case of The New York Times' Iraq war errors, which the paper finally acknowledged, we are now in the last act, aka Lessons Learned. This is when Wise Observers from all corners of the media landscape clear their throats in unison and agree that This Must Never Happen Again.

Yet it always does. Why?

The modern media have an insatiable need for exactly the kind of work that the news scandals are all about -- stories that are a bit suspect, tendentious, vaguely too good (or bad) to be true.

The news business often rewards people who get the story not quite right -- I'm talking about some of the smartest, hardest-working people in the news business.

Consider two news stories on the same hypothetical subject. Journalist A produces a balanced, especially gray report on the study. Journalist B does similar reporting, but in writing his piece, he winds up focusing on several prominent scientists who are particularly impressed with the claim. Better still, they are impressed in a memorable, quoteworthy way.

I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him. I like to argue with the radio.

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

There's a certain truth in what Ann Coulter says. But it's what's called a "poetic truth." And it's the kind of poetic truth best conveyed late in the evening after six or eight drinks while pounding the bar. I wasn't in a bar. I was in my office. It was the middle of the day. And I was getting a headache.

Does the left have this problem? NPR seems more whiny than hectoring, except at fundraising time.

Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone.

There is no excuse for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The individual soldiers involved ought to feel ashamed, as should our military and our nation.

Maybe it's just me, but did I miss a similar storm of moral outrage from the Arab world over the pious Islamists who got out their video cameras to record the gruesome beheadings of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg?

In a now infamous 1971 psychological experiment at Stanford University, in which one randomly selected group of students was permitted to play the role of "guards" over another group of "inmates," abuses began almost immediately, and at one point involved forcing inmates into sexually humiliating role-playing.

"We know we're killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms ... We just don't know yet whether that's the same as winning."

The world's governments and militaries have a striking inability to absorb and apply lessons learned. Guerrilla groups and terrorist organizations, on the other hand, learn lessons very well.

In any military operation it is essential to acquire, coordinate, analyze, and disseminate "actionable intelligence." Here, the United States has fallen far short of the mark in Iraq.

There will always be a fundamental asymmetry in the dynamic between insurgency and counterinsurgency.