If you've been reading the Truth you know who Joseph Wilson is. He wrote the following for the Los Angeles Times:

After the two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me, it is tempting to feel vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Between us, Valerie and I have served the United States for nearly 43 years. I was President George H.W. Bush's acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, and I served as ambassador to two African nations for him and President Clinton. Valerie worked undercover for the CIA in several overseas assignments and in areas related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.

Valerie told me later that it was like being hit in the stomach. Twenty years of service had gone down the drain. She immediately started jotting down a checklist of things she needed to do to limit the damage to people she knew and to projects she was working on. She wondered how her friends would feel when they learned that what they thought they knew about her was a lie.

It was payback — cheap political payback by the administration for an article I had written contradicting an assertion President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. Payback not just to punish me but to intimidate other critics as well.

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From the Financial Times:

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

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From Reuters:

The Bush administration paid scant attention to prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq predicting the ethnic and tribal turmoil that now threatens the future of the country, a newly released 2004 CIA report said.

The report said U.S. policymakers instead concentrated more on the agency's assessments of Iraq's weapons program, which helped them make the case for the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq but which turned out to be flawed and misleading.

"Intelligence assessments on post-Saddam issues were particularly insightful," said the report.

But it added: "In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program) where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right."

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From the Los Angeles Times:

Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.

The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.

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It didn't have to be like this.

Millionaire former defense contractor Dick Cheney would have us believe that in order to deter further terrorist attacks against the United States, we must undergo a decades-long war against every extremist militant group anywhere near the Middle East. But that is not the only path or even the best path. The proper response to the 9/11 attacks was the one Bush seemed, at first, to be taking: identifying the planners and financers of the attacks, identifying who they work for, and killing or apprehending them all. It seemed to be going well in the beginning. The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership (or let us in to get them ourselves), so we removed the Taliban from power and went to work. Osama was on the run, we heard. We hadn't caught him yet, but we figured he was cut off from the rest of al Qaeda, unable to raise more money or inspire further attacks. We felt confident that the main terrorist group threatening the US (and the only one that had attacked us in the last 10 years) would soon be crippled; they would be unable to attack us and other groups would be deterred from doing so.

But then things changed. Bin Laden seemed to have been forgotten. Instead, Bush created a crisis in Iraq. Iraq was a problem that had been safely simmering on the back burner after 9/11. Ten years of economic sanctions and nuisance bombing had rendered Saddam incapable of terrorizing his neighbors or even all the people within his borders. Tough talk hadn't gotten weapons inspectors back in, but it didn't seem a pressing problem. Bush decided to make it a problem. Initially, this author questioned his timing but not his strategy. The massive buildup of US military in the Persian Gulf did what I thought it was supposed to do: it forced Saddam to let UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq. I was reminded of something a political science professor had said on the first day of class: the threat of force is a use of power; the use of force is not.

But then, even though Iraqi authorities had cooperated with the inspectors, even though the inspectors found no evidence of banned weapons stockpiles or development, even though Bush's claims about aluminum tubes, uranium imports, and drone aircraft were shown to be false, he ordered an invasion anyway. Soon it became clear that the invasion was not only ill-advised but ill-planned, and our country found ourself making the same mistake we made in Vietnam: fighting a guerilla war with conventional forces.

And now Cheney says it's only the beginning.
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Iraq assembly changes mind, defuses vote rule row - Yahoo! News

Iraq's parliament reversed itself on Wednesday over rules governing a forthcoming constitutional referendum, interpreting wording in a way that should make the October 15 ballot fairer, the assembly's acting chairman said.

The parliamentary about-face followed a storm of protest over its decision three days ago to define the word "voters" two ways in the same sentence -- in effect making it virtually impossible for Iraqis to reject the constitution.

Objections came particularly from disgruntled Sunni Arabs who dislike the constitution but also from the United Nations, which said such an interpretation was unfair and did not meet international standards.

UN condemns Iraq charter change

The United Nations has criticised changes to Iraq's electoral law that make it harder for Iraqis to reject the draft constitution. The two-thirds majority needed in three provinces to defeat the constitution will now be counted from all registered - as opposed to actual - voters.

"We have expressed our position to the national assembly and to the leadership of the government," said Jose Aranaz, a legal adviser to the UN electoral team in Iraq, in an interview with Reuters news agency.

Mr Aranaz said parliament's decision was unacceptable and would not meet international standards.

On Sunday Shia and Kurdish members of parliament pushed through the changes in the referendum rules on 15 October.

Sunni Arabs reacted angrily to the amendments on Monday.

Many Sunni Arabs oppose the draft constitution on the grounds that its federal provisions could lead to the break-up of Iraq.

They are the majority in three Iraqi provinces, but largely boycotted the general election in January this year.

The drafting of a constitution and a national vote on it, were meant to draw Sunni Iraqis into the political process, thereby reducing support for the mainly Sunni backed insurgency.

On Monday Saleh al-Mutlaq, of the Sunni group Iraqi National Dialogue, called the change the voting law a "clear forgery".

That's the story in detail. But all you'll hear from the US press and US government is "Iraq is having elections in October."
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In the interest of balance, here is a report from Human Rights Watch condemning the attacks by Iraqi resistance fighters on civilians in Iraq.

The Musayyib bombing is but one example of an insurgent attack in Iraq targeting civilians. Since the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003, armed opposition groups have purposely killed thousands of civilians—men, women and children. Across the country, insurgents have used car bombs and suicide bombers, like the one in Musayyib, to maximize the number of civilian injuries and deaths. They have assassinated government officials, politicians, judges, journalists, humanitarian aid workers and those deemed to be collaborating with the foreign forces in Iraq. They have tortured and summarily executed, sometimes by beheading, persons in their custody. And attacks against legitimate military targets, such as army convoys, have been carried out in such a manner that the foreseeable loss of civilian life was far disproportionate to the military gain. All of these attacks are serious violations of international humanitarian law—war crimes—and in some cases they are crimes against humanity.

Sometimes, both sides in a conflict are the bad guys.
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