Topic: Iraq

I've avoided making Iraq a weblog topic page here, thiinking of The Forsyte Saga's timid old Uncle Timothy, the retired publisher living in Belgravia with his aged sisters and his money safely invested in 3% consols who, after things blew up in the Crimea, put up maps in the drawing room. With lots of colored pins.

But there's been a lot of Iraq lately, and if you glance at the Books Bought list right now you’ll see it's likely that more is coming.

• State of Denial (Woodward)
• The Assasins’ Gate (Packer)
• Prince of the Marshes (Stewart)
• Chain of Command (Hersh)
• The Situation and the Story (Gornick)
• Fiasco (Ricks)
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Chandrasekaran)

Of course, this is going to be remembered as the great issue of the time.

Closer to home, I’m writing a chapter on the way the limitations of print culture has led our leadership to depend on executive summaries and PowerPoint presentations, and to a bastard postmodernism faith that, since text is contingent, you can reshape the world just by really believing in what you're doing.

Of course, since it's all in Tinderbox I can easily go back and tag relevant posts. An agent could search for Iraq and Baghdad and Bush, gather and sort and tag. It took a couple of minutes to do that. Then i used the agent to tag things by hand, omitting some minor notes and adding some — especially What Ended — that the agent missed.