Tough day

Lots of bad news from and on Iraq today. According to the New York Times (reprinted by Yahoo!), some Iraqi defectors provided "worthless" information about the Hussein regime. According to the report,

several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.

And of course, we have the White House scrambling to defend itself from accusations that some staffers leaked a spy's name to discredit her and her husband.

That's all disheartening news, at a time when the the news out of Iraq itself is generally bad enough. The Post also reports today that the Iraqis don't like us as much as recent polls (I blogged about them here) said they did, and they apparently don't like each other much, either.

For those who have been broadly supportive of the Iraq war - as both I personally and Remove All Doubt generally have been - this is all terribly depressing (at least for me; I can't speak for other Remvoe All Doubt correspondents). I still think the war was right, and I remain hopeful for the future, but one has to be honest and admit that things are looking ugly on several levels now. Some good news would not go amiss at the moment.
- posted by Anonymous @ 4:26 PM