BLOG IN HASTE, REPENT AT LEISURE When I linked to this article earlier, I was a bit, er, hasty. The website for The Australian was running slow, and I couldn't get the page to load past the title. I made a critical assumption about the subject of the article: that it was about East Timor. In fact, it was about West Timor, which is still part of Indonesia, and not under U.N. mandate. Inserting my foot squarely into my mouth, I used the article (or, more exactly, the headline) as a base from which to attack the U.N.'s nation-building track record.

Now, I continue to think that we're, on balance, better off without the U.N. running Iraq, but the Australian piece wasn't exactly on point.