Dear Mr. President: we are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.

So begins a letter from Project for a New American Century to Bill Clinton, dated January 1998. It's worth going back to this now we're into year six of the Iraq war. The one lesson I learned from the whole saga was this: there's no need for conspiracies. You can publish your intentions on a website, say the opposite in public, and no-one will care. Truth won't out.

In the run-up to the war, Blair and Bush repeatedly claimed that regime change was not the aim, and that - even right up until the last moment - Hussein had it within his power to stop the war. That's what I found most terrifying - listening to Blair parrot Bush, when I could go to a public website and read, plain as day, the neocons' policy for regime change and the reasons for it. Written by the neocons themselves. They haven't even got the shame to take it down.

The Guardian reflects on 20 years since the Bonfire of the Vanities was written. Another book I haven't read: added to the blog list of unread, though.

This story marks 20 years of change in New York city:

Wolfe chose New York because it said something about America. Now many are wondering if the safer, cleaner, richer city has not also lost its role as the heartbeat of American culture. Wolfe thinks so: his latest book tackling the modern American zeitgeist is set in Miami. 'New York, while it is flourishing, has become a less interesting place. It is not where America is changing any more,' said Brian Abel Regan, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion.

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