I don't know how Colin Powell can stand it. In the run up to war, he appeared to be behind the scenes trying to get the administration to consider using some reason. During this time, it turns out that the State Department performed a study that 
predicted many of the problems in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.
"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities."
The report accurately predicted many other aspects of the occupation, including problems with infrastructure and the reluctance of Iraqiis to support the rebuilding of the civil society.
So it is false to think that the Administration was "surprised" by what happened in Iraq -- they knew, or should have known, what was going to happen. But this is typical of the Administration's response to careful study of problems: they quashed the EPA presenting the true facts regarding air quality after 9/11 and they sat on scientific evidence related to global warming. Careful study all too often inconveniently gets in the way of how their friends want to make money.
What I can't understand is how Colin Powell can stand it.
Today we tried out the Prometheus chat tool. It uses some proprietary protocol so you can't interact with it using any other kind of client, as far as I can tell. It requires the Shockwave plugin. I won't generally install either Flash or Shockwave because they're associated with so much intrusive advertising on the web. (I've seen a mozilla enhancement that replaces the element with a button, to load it if you want, but it doesn't seem to install cleanly under MacOS X). I've gotten less and less tolerant of anything that moves on a page where I'm trying to read something. I've turned animated gifs off and, finally, just quit installing flash and shockwave. For the purposes of trying out the chat environment, I reinstalled shockwave. It was pretty miserable. It crashed when I tried to type unicode characters into it. It has numerous severe limitations: You can neither copy text from the chat nor paste text into the chat. This makes it essentially worthless for exchanging URLs. (It doesn't auto recognize URLs or make them links either). It has a tiny built-in white board which can be used to show slides. The slide that the instructor showed was utterly illegible when rendered at 120x80 pixels, or however big the white board is. You can't paste images into the white board either. It does have a polling tool, so people can write questions one at a time to present to the group during the chat -- kinda like Classtalk or PRS. The chat system creates a default "room" and the instructor can create other rooms, but you can only be in one at a time (although perhaps you could perhaps create separate instances of the client, if you knew how). You can also inspect the logs, but if you do, you leave the room you're in and when you return, none of the extant text is visible.
The main point that the designers were missing is that chat is mostly stupid by itself. Chat becomes useful when you can use it in conjunction with the other things you're doing. When you can have a chat window open at the same type you're writing in the wiki, you can see who else is there and coordinate what you're working on to avoid conflicting edits. If you're writing documents, you can quick fire off questions and get quick answers back and forth. But Chat is a terribly inefficient way for just sitting there trying to communicate. One person is mostly just sitting there while the other person types. I type pretty fast, but it's still a waste of time to carry on a conversation that way -- as an adjunct to other things, it can be really useful, though. Buzz and I are proposing to set aside an hour per week to be available for chat and we've picked the night before the students assignments are due -- that way people who have last minute questions can quick fire them off to get answers.
Having seen the Equation Editor, the Chat Tool and the Discussion Tool, I'm more convinced than ever that Prometheus, like most Learning Management Systems (LMS), are designed to pass the RFP test. People requesting RFPs for a LMS have a long check list of desired features: Does it have chat? Yep. Does it have quizzing? Yep. etc. Therefore, it must have all these things, but that doesn't mean they have to be any good. The free and open source tools are all better than any of the individual components in any LMS I've ever seen. Give me Chatzilla any day. I will say that Prometheus has been reliable.