I owe JON LEE ANDERSON of the New Yorker an apology. I have read and appreciated his articles from Iraq before and after the war in the New Yorker (not to mention his excellent biography of Che Guevara). Yet, I have several weeks ago posted a link to a critical review of his last book on Iraq from the Nation magazine, without reading the book myself. I put him (in that post) unfairly in the category of American foreign correspondents that I regularly mock. He asked me (in a note) to read the book myself, before accepting the conclusions of somebody else. He is right. I shall read his book. Yesterday on the plane, I read this excellent article by him in the New Yorker: "He replied, “I spoke to an Iraqi doctor friend last week and I asked him the same question. He said to me, ‘The country is slowly dying.’ He was always an optimist before, so to hear him say this was just so dispiriting to me. My own sense is that I don’t see a good, positive way ahead."