Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.
We hold no illusions about the political feasibility of getting people to Congress to enact Justice Alito's "Plan B. But what is merely a fragile hope from one point of view is a political opportunity from another.
The transition from unusual experience to delusional belief would be facilitated if, as our results suggest, body image can be explained away such that it is merely a fragile and only temporarily stable solution, which is hostage to the probabilistic workings of sensory integration rather than the other way around.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said: "The fact that such small changes to the analysis make the difference between a hiatus or not merely underlines how fragile a concept it was in the first place".
Is it fair to judge ourselves and others for not fitting into neatly assigned boxes, or are we merely protecting a fragile cause by policing the turf?
Rebellious but also fragile.
By documenting a series of events, one is able to see things which, if merely left to the fragile human memory, may fuse into meaningless, disconnected scenes in a panorama of many human happenings.
Gordon Marsden, Labour's shadow minister for higher education and a former Open University tutor, said: "The Open University announcement merely underlines the very fragile and worrying situation for lifelong learning in general and part-time higher education learning in particular.
Perhaps male pop idols in general are afforded more rounded documentary treatment: beginning with the countless lurid spins on the Marilyn Monroe legend, the temptation to portray their most ill-fated female counterparts merely as fallen angels, as fragile victims of the light, has always been strong.
