Best line of the week, so far

President Bush is losing his top day-to-day Iraq advisor. If you’re wondering what went haywire in Iraq, it’s worth examining the faint praise being heaped on Meghan O’Sullivan now that she’s leaving:

Stanford University professor Larry Diamond, who worked in Baghdad with O’Sullivan during Bremer’s tenure, called her an amazingly quick study of Iraqi politics.

She “came in with very little knowledge of Iraq when the war began,” Diamond said, but by the time she left some Iraqis were calling her “the Gertrude Bell of the American mission” – a reference to the British civil administrator who helped create Iraq in the early 1920s.

So, in other words, she’s a graduate of the learn-by-doing school of nation building.

And, of course, she stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

FunctionalAmbivalent