Bleak but persuasive summary of the US situation in Iraq and Afghanistan

This is the single best summary I have seen of the current "state of play" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The author (Thomas Powers) is one of the very finest journalists covering US intelligence agencies, and whose excellent review of George Tenet's "I am not the scapegoat" autobiography (AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM: MY YEARS AT THE CIA) produced an exchange of letters published in the NY Review of Books in which Powers wrote this ominous but entirely plausible assessment: "I have thought from the first day of war that it would destroy two presidents—suck up all their energy and attention, while every other matter of importance was allowed to drift. Two presidents, I thought, because the second in the early flush of triumph at winning the White House would look for a new strategy to put off or disguise the reality of failure, much as Nixon did in 1969. Of course the new strategy would fail, and the new president would find him- or herself insisting that the new strategy needed more time, or that someone else—Iran perhaps—was to blame."