Bush should watch "more Al Jazeera television"

"The Bush administration's central intelligence failure was not that it failed to tap enough telephones. Rather, it didn't bother to understand the mind-set in Iraq or the larger Arab world — and it still doesn't.

The transfer of sovereignty is a useful moment to look back at what went so wrong in Iraq. As I see it, the root problem was hubris born in a Washington echo chamber, and a resulting conviction that Iraqis would welcome us with flowers.

They even mangled the country's name — Mr. Bush called it Eye-rack — yet they bet American lives that all would go well. That's "the arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright termed it when Democrats made similar blunders in Vietnam.

"We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again," Don Rumsfeld complained during the war. "What they do is, when there's a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. . . . We are dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case — and to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility."

Good point." - NY Times