While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they've done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.

I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.

The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.