Juan Cole wrote this remark when discussing Condoleezza Rice's Senate hearing to confirm her as secretary of state:

Her notion that the US cannot afford to let failed states fester is something that could be debated. But Iraq was not a failed state in 2002.

Eason Jordan wrote this in The New York Times in April, 2003 (Via Times' paid archive):

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.

Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

If that's not a failed state, maybe Cole could provide his definition of what one is.