Rad Geek People's Daily

Well, good.

The story, which comes from a draft order circulating at the Pentagon, is that the man in the White House wants (1) to withdraw about 2,000 of the remaining U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (leaving about 2,500 U.S. soldiers in the country), (2) to withdraw some additional soldiers from Iraq on top of the force reductions that were already planned (leaving a bit under 3,000 U.S. soldiers in the country), and (3) to withdraw nearly all of the 700 plus U.S. soldiers currently in Somalia. (The headline might be read to suggest that the proposal was to get all U.S. soldiers out of the three countries; if it were, that would be better, but, alas, the occupations will continued their scheduled progress towards ending with a whimper.)

I can only hope the government follows through with its draft order; if anything even remotely good comes out of the dead-end of this ridiculous clusterfuck of a presidency, that will be some sort of progress.

Meanwhile, consider the pairing of that story with this one — with, that is, this (hopefully now) narrowly-averted toying with the idea of an insanely dangerous military escalation, in the interest of some kind of idiotic Parthian-shot show-off of warmongering bravado. That pairing is, I think, just about an apt one-day’s news demonstration of the record of this ridiculous clusterfuck of a presidency’s whole attitude towards and practice of foreign policy.