Powell seems to be a man of some integrity, and yet getting him to admit even in the slightest way that the admin messed up is like pulling deep-rooted teeth.

Why won't the Bush admin admit it screwed up? Because it'd be political suicide not only for his govt but possibly also for the GOP to admit they led this country in the slaughter of thousands of people not for reasons of national security, but because of either incompetance, or (much more disturbingly) because of a still-nebulous agenda which actually called for those deaths.

They yanked [some of] us around by the nose with cooked and spun "intelligence," and the challenge now is getting Americans to admit they were duped. That could be a tough one, because I think we're a people capable of powerful and determined self-deception. Admitting we were wrong about Iraqi WMD means accepting our culpability in the deaths of thousands of people who were both incapable of and uninterested in harming America.

For a lot of us, I'd bet that a path of continued self-deception will be easier. Less painful, certainly.