I’ve just posted part ten, which completes the first chapter. You can now read the whole first chapter in one long post if that strikes your fancy.
Until today I didn’t know there was ever a rape kit backlog. It’s not even a phrase that should exist in the English language. I don’t know the moving parts of the problem at all, but our legislators need to get in there, figure out the problem, and fix it now.
There are very few places of real ambiguity where newspaper writers feel consistently capable of making a definitive judgment. One of them is in whether or not someone is a criminal. They have a very simple formula. If someone has been convicted but not accused, then they have “allegedly” done the deed in question. If someone has been convicted, however, they’re a criminal, and they pretty much did it. They can do this not because the justice system is perfect, but because it’s the best heuristic we have on this question — and, frequently, a very good one in absolute terms.
Of course justice is an adversarial process and so if you were to ask most law enforcement officers whether they were in the business of finding out who was guilty or putting the guilty away, odds are good they’d say the latter. But the initial process of seeking out evidence, and then the deliberative process of the trial, are all about discovering whether or not someone did something criminal. They’re not about ruining lives for no reason, and they’re not about the power of the victim over the accused. There’s simply no more reasonable way to deal with the accusation of one citizen against another than the trial process, and if it takes some time, that’s just because we want to do it right.
This is all by way of endorsing a post at Feministe by Marcella Chester on the importance of complete, rigorous — and therefore often time-consuming — investigations of rape cases. She writes:
Yesterday at my home blog, Abyss2hope, I blogged about a rape case where the woman who was originally viewed as the victim was charged after forensic evidence indicated self-inflicted wounds rather than a stranger assault as she claimed. Today I read about a new case where another woman who reported rape faces similar charges as reported by the Pocono Record. This charge resulted from another type of contradictory evidence. A verified alibi.
… Not surprisingly, this case has already been highlighted by several anti-feminists who see the case as supporting their pet theory about lying women.
What these anti-feminists don’t want to acknowledge is that the collection of evidence which cleared the accused man in this case is a direct result of the very thing these people are attacking. The full and competent investigation of all rape reports.
I don’t want to downplay the very real price that the falsely accused can pay for their bad luck. Of course there are some circles where being accused of rape is practically a badge of honor, merely another piece of evidence that women are all lying whores out to get we poor, poor men. But in decent places it’s often difficult to take the presumption of innocence seriously, and I’ve seen circumstances even recently where so much as admitting “A girl once falsely accused me of rape, but it was settled” is seen as tantamount to saying “I raped a woman, and I’ll do it again soon.” It really can destroy a life, though it doesn’t do so nearly as often as some will tell you.
But that’s the price we pay for a competent, reasonable, and fair justice system. Just as human beings can destroy each other physically, they can use the apparatus of the state to destroy each other’s reputations. That’s unfortunate, but it’s far better than simply ignoring or intimidating women when they come forward with an accusation. We could do better as a society at remembering that the justice system is a way of knowing — but we could also do better at remembering why it’s essential that it be allowed to do that work in the first place.
There was only one part of the post that I didn’t find especially persuasive, and it’s this last bit:
Too many people make what happened to Easterling’s ex (false claim of rape) equivalent to what happened to Lewis’s estranged wife (assault, kidnapping, rape).
I don’t agree — which results in my being labeled by some people as irrational or hateful.
Now I don’t like to talk about this, but let’s make something clear. I’ve had an extremely traumatic experience involving rape — one that still makes my chest hurt and my stomach boil every time I think about it. There’s a man in prison right now because of it, and I can’t exaggerate how grateful I am of that fact. I’m sure, among other things, that it saved the life of someone I care for deeply. So I take this very seriously. And I have no sympathy for the perpetrators and much for the victims.
But if I understand what Chester is getting at here, I’m not entirely sure I can get behind it. On the one hand, obviously accusing someone of rape falsely is not nearly as bad as actual rape, assault, kidnapping, etc. But to rhetorically minimize it strikes me as a rather large and unnecessary mistake. If we can agree that rape accusations should always be fully investigated, we should also be able to agree that false accusations are firmly in the category of “Things that should never happen,” just like violence and rape itself. To minimize the importance and the harm of a false accusation on the implicit basis of its unreality as speech is to ignore the dimension of action — or rather, to forget that it’s not only a sound someone makes but a speech act. In other words, because it’s an action that can destroy lives, it’s an absolutely awful thing to do and there is truly no reason to defend those who do it, even if they are somewhat preferable to rapists. Even from a strictly feminist perspective, it should be easy to agree that women who make false accusations of rape are hurting society by giving anti-feminist assholes ammo for their arguments that rape is often a lie.
I should also note that fear of false accusations is a very real thing among men. I was actually trained in my former job as a childcare provider to avoid situations wherein I was alone with children specifically because, as a man, I had good reason to fear accusations of rape. Of course that’s often not an option in childcare and as such I was frequently conscious of taking that risk. I have some faith in the justice system to exonerate me of any such charges, of course, but that faith is not absolute. Fundamentally, this is another demonstration of how the understanding that men have a weapon between their legs is damaging to both women and men.
Blogging being a largely reactive practice — even when I write broadly enough that I don’t end up linking anybody, that only means I’ve been inspired by several occasions — I’ve found it difficult to keep up with my usual schedule ever since we went into general election mode. I think it was Atrios who once said that there was a sort of “message of the day” on the blogosphere, that blogs like Talking Points Memo set the agenda, and sometimes he didn’t feel like echoing everyone else online. That’s where I’m at right now — I don’t feel like reinforcing what you’re reading everywhere else.
Nor do you need me to. Yesterday I was just as amused as Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Roy Edroso, et. al by the “Obama is using German to advertise in Germany!” kerfuffle as well as the “He’s using profile photos of himself, just like Hitler!” nonsense. But I didn’t have anything new to add to the subject, and furthermore if for some reason you wanted to know what I thought about it, all you would have had to do was ask yourself and it would be self-evident that I would think it was stupid.
I have a little more energy for attacking McCain than I do for defending Obama, but at this point if you’re reading any of the blogs I recommend you probably know how many times he’s fucked up on basic facts of central importance to foreign policy recently, which is supposed to be his strong area. He doesn’t seem to know when the Surge started, etc. But it’s hard for me to add anything here, too; every day, John McCain continues to be a terrible candidate. Every day, I continue to think he’s absolutely not the man for the job and possibly one of the worst choices anyone could make. But you know that too, and if my opinion matters to you for some reason then it’s already figured into your decision on the subject.
I had the same problem to some extent during the primary, but I usually got past it because A) I felt there was a reasonable argument to be made on Clinton’s behalf, which made it more interesting to make the counter-argument than it is to explain again and again why an ignorant, arrogant, self-centered warmonger doesn’t deserve the job, and B) I actually felt I had a chance of changing a few minds there. People who were voting for Clinton weren’t necessarily beyond my reach. I often feel as if those who plan to vote for McCain are beyond not only my reach, but reality itself. What am I supposed to tell them? How can I persuade them?
Part of my frustration with this also extends to a degree of exhaustion with my favorite blogs, many of which have become so dedicated to the presidential contest I sometimes get genuinely bored with it and frequently wish for something else to talk about. Keeping in mind that most leftblog readers are smart enough or at least ideologically immune enough to ignore arguments that Obama secretly wants to be identified with Hitler, I wish their writers would worry less about such silly attacks and more about teaching me new things. Not everyone needs to write about the latest nonsense. If I see it condemned in one place, that’s funny and a good time. If I see it condemned everywhere, that’s boring and useless.
Imagine my surprise to discover that this crock of shit was written by Andrew Beckerman:
The success of a band like The Decemberists is not immaterial for discussing the existence of a band like Bodies of Water. Not that the former is an influence on the latter – Bodies of Water was already a band before The Decemberists gained mainstream acclaim. The point of bringing up Mr. Meloy is that the landmark success of a certain style often creates a niche, a niche that exposes artists that play the same kind of music, or use the same strategy, or are tangentially related to that successful band. Regardless, think of it like gravity. A particularly heavy object deforms space-time in such a way that smaller bodies around it are trapped in that concavity. It’s an after-the-fact process, though. At some certain point in time, you have many artists playing the same kind of music, and for different contingent reasons, one gets popular thus suddenly raising the cachet of everyone using similar aesthetic strategies. These lucky bands then create conditions for the next wave of acts, which can approach the style cynically, as a conscious decision, or as some kind of natural outgrowth of development.
Bodies of Water can be located within that first generation, as one of the bands whose existence does the altering of that landscape. While much of the press surrounding them namechecks bands like Arcade Fire and discusses the theatricality of the band, that description stinks of whisper down the lane. Someone at some point (perhaps the band members themselves, as they self-profess to be purveyors of “sincere melodrama of musical theatre”) said they were theatrical, and it’s been repeated ever since. It’s like teaching Marx and having some snot-nosed prick all of 18 years tell you, “Socialism is good on paper, but it doesn’t work in reality.” Sorry kid, just ‘cause your dad murmured that while pouring over some shitty novel like Atlas Shrugged doesn’t mean it has validity, and surely not as it tumbles out of the mouth of some know-nothing doofus.
Just repeating that Bodies of Water is theatrical doesn’t make it so. Maybe theatrically influenced in some way, but if you want theatricality, put on a Frog Eyes album. There’s drama for you. Regardless, I think one can get a much better grasp on the band’s music by seeing the songs as long, somewhat-complex pop songs – ones derived from much different circumstances than The Decemberists’ boring narratives – rather than grand, theatrical gospels. Have we learned nothing from the Romans? Uh, or the medievals? Or whomever the fuck said: Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Just because some event precedes another doesn’t make it the cause. And in cases like being influenced by something, causal understandings are a ridiculous way of understanding what’s going on anyway.
I mean Jesus Christ, did he even listen to the record? He could have written this review without going anywhere near a single Bodies of Water song. In fact one almost suspects he must have, as denying that the band is theatric is rather like denying that while Socialism is good on paper, it doesn’t work in reali — wait a minute! So that’s what he was getting at!
No, I’m just kidding. Fuck ‘im. This guy needs to get the fuck out of this business.
Well, girls, if you’re out there following the American presidential campaign you’ll be glad to know that The Washington Post is around to tell you that the perfect wife is always deferential, does everything she can to support her husband’s career, and beyond that doesn’t bore him with a lot of talking about stuff.
… Meanwhile, the author of the piece, Libby Copeland, has risen over the course of her ten year career from being a Washington Post intern to being a feature writing at one of America’s premiere newspapers. One assumes she’s not, in other words, actually someone who thinks that Cindy McCain’s traditionalist heiress lifestyle is something every woman should aspire to. It’s odd. You don’t expect comprised of a 72 year-old man and a 64 year-old woman to really be a model of forward-looking egalitarian marriage and I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with that — they’re people of their time, and they seem happy enough with it. But why would we want to hold this anachronistic model up as an ideal to which we should all be aspiring?
This relates to something I’ve been thinking about for a little while. One of the really puzzling things about the pervasiveness of sexism, racism, etc. is that if you think about it you’ll probably realize most people you know don’t seem to be very sexist or racist themselves. Of course part of that is that people tend to know better than to scream at the top of their lungs about their prejudices, but I think more than that it’s the fact that our general willingness to go along with the crowd significantly reduces our ability to behave morally as a collective.
In other words, there are a lot of really horrible and sexist ideas floating around about the “ideal woman,” but if you look at actual women very few subscribe to them very much at all in their own lives anymore. This is not to say that every woman is totally unsexist or absolutely liberated — of course that’s not true at all — but most women I know speak their minds, spend plenty of energy advancing their own careers, and generally live in a far more feminist way than they probably even realize. Yet they frequently claim to or behave as if they support the sort of retrograde ideas about femininity that dominated the ’50s.
And I think that basically this is about how boring we’re trained to be from birth — how we’re taught to echo what we see and hear instead of challenging what we disagree with in our lives around us. It’s under this system of rules that confessing my atheism is frequently considered a major social faux pas, and it’s under this system that seemingly liberated women echo bullshit narratives of gender that even a cursory examination of their own lives betrays as false. It’s not that Libby Copeland truly believes that Cindy McCain’s life as a Stepford Wife is the ideal model of femininity — it’s that she’s simply too boring to say what she, if she’s honest with herself, must know.
And this is sort of my theory of the patriarchy. There are genuinely a number of really awful people out there who intentionally push sexist ideas for their own gratification. But most of those who help them aren’t really sexist so much as they’re boring assholes who don’t feel it’s worth their energy or the social awkwardness to genuinely fucking engage with life.
The first chapter of The Crawl is coming to a close as Harris and the old man are drafted by the Militia of the Pure.
It took some additional work by Iraqi leaders, but it seems the press are finally being forced to cover their desire to follow Obama’s plan.
It strikes me as just slightly odd that Post reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose, like Michelle Obama a Princeton grad, could write an entire mini-essay on “Michelle, meritocracy and me” - about the special difficulties faced by black Americans trying navigate the overclass, and her worry that “no amount of pedigree and personal polish will let us entirely escape suspicion, mistrust and jealousy” - without even mentioning affirmative action, let alone pondering its impact on the elite African-American experience. “I’ve given a lot of thought to the intersection of race, education and meritocracy,” she writes, “based on both my personal experience and my job covering schools for The Post.” Maybe she should think a little harder.
Jesus Christ — does he read these things before he hits “Publish”? If you’re going to the trouble of reading someone very different from you, on a subject you don’t know shit about, maybe the fact that they don’t emphasize what you would expect them to about their experiences should be taken as an opportunity to learn rather than a reason to (effectively) call the writer a simpleton. In this particular instance, if Theola Labbé-DeBose is writing about “the special difficulties faced by black Americans trying to navigate the overclass” and affirmative action doesn’t come up, maybe Ross should take that as a sign that affirmative action isn’t as central to that experience as he imagines it to be.
In my time at Butler, an exceedingly white school that grasps desperately at Ivy League pretensions in order to attract the dull children of new money insufficiently connected to ensure their pasty, writhing brood a seat at Harvard, my co-workers and I tutored several black students who were working on papers about diversity and our school. Affirmative action only came up once. It just isn’t that important to most people.
And there’s no particular reason it should be, either. Contrary to what the conservative fixation might suggest you to believe, most people realize it’s a fairly modest and marginal policy that will have few if any noticeable effects on their own lives. Most people don’t think “affirmative action” the second they see a black person in a good school or a good job because most people aren’t as stupid and uncharitable as Ross Douthat is when it comes to black people.
It’s also worth drawing out the implications of this post, which Douthat is too cowardly to make explicit. He thinks that if Labbé-DeBose thought a little harder, she could understand why people are so frequently resentful, suspicious, and jealous of blacks in the higher echelons of society. He seems to think that the answer is affirmative action. In other words, he’s suggesting that it’s essentially their own fault and that white people are perfectly justified in their suspicions, because after all a small portion of the black population doesn’t “deserve” to be there in purely meritocratic terms. If only they could abandon affirmative action, which as we all know every black person loves, supports, and depends on, then racism would end and blacks would be welcomed with open arms into the ivy league and prestigious jobs.
Again: What a condescending prick.
This is especially irritating because it’s so obviously untrue. Does anyone believe for a second that stupid white people will stop crying “special treatment!” and “political correctness!” every time they see a black person with something they want if only affirmative action goes away? It’s not about that — it’s about the fundamentally ridiculous and racist belief that black people are less deserving of good things than whites. Racists like Douthat know in their heart of hearts that black people have less merit than white people, so they know that whenever they see a black person doing well that they must have cheated somehow to get ahead. Nothing we can say will convince them otherwise, and that’s why it’s best to just ignore the pitiful crybabies.
I love Tracy more than ten world elephants, and today is our two-year anniversary. In a little less than a year, we will be married.
High fives to the universe. You aren’t as bad as I make you out to be.
Jamelle writes:
If there is anything which really stands out in this (read: very depressing) story of an Iraq War veteran who eventually succumbs to his untreated PSTD, it’s the degree to which soldiers are discouraged from trying to address any post-deployment psychological problems. It would be one thing if the VA simply refused to treat them (though, don’t worry, the Bush Administration tried), but to see military leadership actively shame soldiers into holding their problems in is disturbing in a way I can’t actually describe. It doesn’t really come as any surprise though; in a lot of ways, the military is a hypermascuine reflection of mainstream society. And if emotional displays by men are frowned upon in mainstream society, then they are even more frowned on in a military environment (this goes too for women in the military, who are expected to supress their feminity). Unfortunately, it’s probably a bit unrealistic to expect any of this to change in even the long-term; our notions of what constitutes “proper” masculinity are so ingrained in our consciousness and cultural discourse that it would take nothing less than a radical overhaul to change them.
I actually think this overstates the problem. If you compare our modern discourse on masculinity to that of, say, the ’50s, you’re going to see a nontrivial improvement. Much has been made of the liberation of the Mrs. Cleavers of the world, but Mr. Cleaver doesn’t really exist either anymore — it’s acceptable to admit that men are human beings with at least two or three emotions. The extent to which our awful version of masculinity has improved is easy to miss largely because the initial version was even more incredibly awful.
Furthermore, we have a strong model for advancing the cause of liberating men from masculinity in the feminist movement. They transformed our society in a profound way that I would have probably thought flatly impossible had I been alive at the outset of their movement, and this gives me reason to hope that we could do the same. The problem is mainly that it’s much easier for an oppressed group to rise up than it is for an empowered group to actively abandon privilege, which is a big part of what would be necessary. Another problem is that many feminists seem deeply disinterested in, even actively opposed to, helping this fledgling movement in any way. (I call it fledgling rather than imaginary because I know many men want it, which is at a very small remove from actually having it.)
Still, I think the opportunity is there, and that’s why I keep posting about the injustice of our lives as the warrior class and the pain of being so completely emotionally and physically separated from other human beings. I hope Jamelle will keep working to transform masculinity, and I hope you will too.
Whether it’s because he’s too stupid, too lazy, or too in the tank for McCain, I’ll leave for you to decide.
Here’s the McCain campaign’s response to the news of the day. It’s considerably more optimistic and hard-headed than the utterance from the anonymous Republican strategist i quoted below.
“Let’s be clear, the only reason that the conversation about reducing troop levels in Iraq is happening is because John McCain challenged the failed Rumsfield-strategy in Iraq and argued for the surge strategy that is responsible for the successes we’ve achieved and which Barack Obama opposed. Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain has never ignored the facts on the ground in Iraq, he’s never avoided the warzone before proposing new strategy, and he’s never voted against funding our troops in the field. If John McCain was following Barack Obama’s lead on foreign policy, the United States would have already withdrawn from Iraq in a humiliating defeat at the hands of al Qaeda.” —Tucker Bounds, spokesman John McCain 2008.
The upshot here is that many Republican strategists think that Iraq remains an albatross around McCain’s neck even though McCain has a very solid case to make about his political courage and his judgment. The Republican id is still smarting from the 2006 election smackdown, and the consequence of McCain’s good judgment may well help his opponent, politically. Maliki has his elections to deal with., too, but knowing everything he knows and crediting the surge with security gains, he likes Obama’s proposal — or doesn’t mind being associated with it.
This is factually wrong. If Marc has the necessary brain cells to remember the 2006 election, he should be able to remember that we were talking about withdrawal then too. In fact everybody was talking about it so much that the Democrats actually got a blowout victory in said election on the hopes that withdrawal would actually occur. This was before the surge supposedly changed everything, and this was after Obama had already begun staking out his position — the position he still holds today.
Meanwhile, the only reason the McCain campaign is discussing withdrawal is the same reason Bush promised first a shockingly brief engagement and then a series of reductions that never actually came: he knows it’s the only way he can possibly win.
If Marc can’t be bothered to remember this much, he could at least point out the inconsistencies in the McCain campaign’s narrative. Depending on when you ask them, Obama is embracing John McCain’s position or insisting on withdrawal yesterday no matter what.
And if he can’t be bothered to mention that, he could at least point out that Obama’s position isn’t either of those things: he’s got a specific goal for withdrawal that can be modified depending on what happens in Iraq between now and the final exit. That’s not withdrawal right this minute no matter what, and it’s not McCain’s position either. It is, however, what voters actually want.
Tracy and I confirmed today that we should be able to bike to and from work/school (as well as other major destinations) at our Las Cruces home, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate an air car come grocery day.
On the Bush-McCain camp’s slow drift toward “time horizons,” he wrote:
What’s the difference between a time horizon — which obviously involves the temporal dimension — and a schedule? The degree of rigidity. But the directional push is clear: everyone is now talking about bringing troops home…Obama is most closely associated with the idea of bringing troops home… even as it may well be true that the reason why everyone’s aboard the withdrawal wagon is because McCain championed the troop surge in the first place.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. All you have to do to understand this is to think for six seconds about the speech where Bush officially announced and explained the surge — he was talking about it as a way to get out then, too. The conversation around Iraq didn’t change because Bush had been saying that kind of thing for years and everyone knew better than to believe him except stupid journalists like Marc Ambinder. Now Bush is saying exactly the same thing and stupid journalists like Marc Ambinder are pushing it as a real shift in positions because they know that would help John McCain, and because John McCain believes it, and anything that benefits John McCain or that John McCain says has to be true and awesome and mavericky.
Obama is also “most closely associated” with the idea because he has a credible claim to actually planning to do it, and “everyone is [pretending to be] aboard the withdrawal wagon” not because John McCain is awesome, but for the same reason they always intermittently pretend to want withdrawal: because the war is really unpopular and loses them elections.
Josh Marshall thinks Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s plan is a huge deal too, so maybe I’m wrong. Certainly I’d like to be. Some of his reasoning, however, strikes me as poor. He writes:
All understand it is a given that the war is unpopular and that the vast majority of Americans want out as soon as possible. The big of wiggle room is just what’s ‘possible.’ McCain has invested his entire campaign in support for the purportedly nascent Iraqi democracy al Maliki represents and the claim that Obama’s support for a timetable for withdrawal irresponsibly risks losing the gains we’ve achieved and giving Iraq back to al Qaeda.
Here, with a brush of the hand and in so many words, al Maliki says, “No, we’re good.”
What exactly is McCain to say to that? He can hardly turn against Maliki or say he doesn’t have a feel of the situation on the ground.
Well, you know, rationally that would be difficult to argue. But already McCain’s campaign has dismissed the response as political posturing, so A) that’s one workaround and B) I expect him to do it anyway if pressed. It’s not as if we invaded a country against their will because we thought they knew what they were doing — if we’re condescending enough to force our will on them, why wouldn’t we be condescending enough to disregard a man whose import in the domestic conversation is close to nil?
Again, I’m hoping against hope that I’m wrong here, but I think the best we can hope for is that the high-information segment of the population hears Maliki’s statement and agrees that it matters. Unfortunately the high-information voter already has a position, and it’s strongly held, whether for or against withdrawal. So again I’m having trouble seeing how this ends up mattering very much. But I’ve been wrong before, and I will be again.
To really understand the importance of Maliki’s comments, you need to consider their opposite. Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, “at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves.” It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about “Obama’s Iraq Problem.” Obama would probably lose the race.
In a way it would be nice if I could believe this. Under the circumstances, Maliki should be extremely important to us. The statements of the elected leader of the country we occupy should hold massive weight in this country, especially in terms of our military presence in Iraq, but instead I’d be stunned if more than 20% of the country even knows who he is. In fact I know very little about him myself — I never bothered to find out more precisely because of how irrelevant he is to the American political discourse and the Iraqi reality.
So Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s plan should mean a lot, but it won’t. And Maliki’s rejection of Obama’s plan would likewise be important, except that no one would care. The only reason the press would be willing to even acknowledge it happened — the only circumstance under which I can see Ezra being right — is if they were sure it would help McCain. Even then, it wouldn’t be all that likely.
Again, that’s the sweet, sweet smell of sovereignty wafting in. Let it wash over you. Try not to gag.
Maliki wouldn’t risk sticking his thumb in Bush’s eye over the timetable by endorsing Obama’s plan if he believed Bush was taking this “time horizon” bullshit seriously. But he, like anyone paying attention to the issue, oughtta know better, and it looks like he does.
It’s important that we don’t let the press paint Bush’s plan as the real thing. They would have tried under normal circumstances and since John McCain would benefit from it they’re likely to really try now — but it’s all a big, dumb lie and I hope to God no one falls for it.
TPM draws our attention to the surprise twist ending of the “Iraq wants a deadline for withdrawal” story:
In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals — such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq. The President and Prime Minister agreed that the goals would be based on continued improving conditions on the ground and not an arbitrary date for withdrawal.
In other words, we’ll stand down as they stand up.
In other words, stay the course.
Nobody’s reading The Crawl. But if you don’t read it, how can you find out about the last supper?
