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I've been mostly ignoring the Iraq news here, because I feel it's adequately talked to death elsewhere and because it's just so depressing, but I couldn't ignore today's front page:

Remember all that effort this winter to prevent the war? It started last year. Creepiest paragraph:

Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved.

Remember this winter when the Bush administration claimed to have secret evidence of Saddam's weapons program that it couldn't share for security reasons? Turns out they meant secret conjecture.

American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

And finally: In Iraq, war architect Paul Wolfowitz vows to find the real killers.