functional governance and strong economy. I am cracking up, this is DC. End of meeting a guy comes up to me who didn't say a word: "Sir, I am from the Dept of Defense. You got it right, we want to support you, but for political reasons we need to show up in the 4th Quarter." The entertainment value of the day was

invitation was in hand, I pushed the envelope of our itinerary both because I had some specific interests and because I wanted to be able to escape the Dept of Defense bubble. We went outside the wire in Basra and drove for 30 minutes to a fertilizer plant. I was told that five months ago (before the Battle of Bas