Thanks to the miracle of timed posting, this blog suffered no service interruptions while I ventured out to Georgetown for an audience with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary-general and a person whose standard-in-America-but-fairly-exceptional-in-Europe comfort with military force just fascinates me. I wish I could say that I came away from his speech and subsequent dialogue with a few online writers and bloggers with any better sense of what accounts for this creature, but you can’t really ask a man “Can you explain how it is a being with your politics manages to excel, in Denmark and in Europe?” in an hour-long roundtable, so my post on what Rasmussen said will have to stand.

But man is Rasmussen prone to declarative overstatement about NATO and Afghanistan. “This year” we’ll begin transferring security duties to the Afghans; the Dutch government collapse had nothing to do with Afghanistan (I totally accept that I overstated it earlier but Afghanistan clearly didn’t have nothing to do with it) and no other countries will take any antiwar lessons from it; in Marja “as soon as a district is liberated and cleared we provide governance, provide development assistance, make sure people in the local communities will be provided a better livelihood” when ISAF is saying civilian aid is progressing “slowly”… I don’t know, it’s not like my Danish is any good and I’m one of the most overstatement-prone people you’ll meet, but there’s just something about Rasmussen that comes across as ceaselessly optimistic.