Only one of Tony Blair's mea culpas in his CNN interview stands out as truly significant: his partial acknowledgment that without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic State (Isis).
The term was a hedge, an acknowledgment that without sustained firsthand access to a person — even, say, a ubiquitous billionaire celebrity whose teen-age pregnancy, sexual abuse, spiritual evolution, eighteen-year engagement, weight fluctuations, reading tastes, aching "vajayjay," and fondness for candlelit baths are familiar to millions — there's only so much that we can really know.
As Martin Chulov (The crucial point: a partial acknowledgment that without the war there would have been no Isis, 26 October) quite rightly states, the Iraq war stoked these divisions, destroying the country, favouring Shia, oppressing Sunni and generating the chaos of a civil religious war.
It seems odd to hear Romney criticize big government without any acknowledgment that he has made much of his fortune managing the retirement funds of many public employees.
But it felt a bit unsettling to be reveling in these tunes, lively or lamenting, without some acknowledgment that things are rough in Istanbul at the moment.
Without some acknowledgment that the S.E.C.'s allegations have a basis in fact, Citigroup had agreed to pay $285 million to dispose of a case quickly.
(Week in Review, May 13): Your lexicon of medical argot is incomplete without an acknowledgment that such lingo (including several of your examples) was first introduced to the public more than 20 years ago in Samuel Shem's novel "The House of God".
I've had people keep me waiting long past when they told me to arrive without any acknowledgment that my time matters too.
They also reported four other variables as significant that had not been mentioned in the protocol or its amendments, without any acknowledgment that these measures were introduced post hoc.
It is an acknowledgment that is now long overdue.
