Why? Would you listen to anyone pointing out that the speech reads like a joke you tell at a party after a few many drinks? (It does, anyway)

There's really only two problems with the speech, to be honest. The intro and the outro(and many bits in between, but I'll simplify it for convinience). They are full of the general platitudes about foreign affairs that bear no resemblance whatsoever with reality, which we have come to know as the hallmark of the Bush administration. In a welcome change, however, the scriptwriters have decided to insert a very pragmatic on- site examination into the main part of the speech, and it is shameful that the speech do not contain anything else to put those comments in the appropriate context. He speaks of a changing battlefield, the challenges put on the forces, how Iraqis is trusted to partake in stopping the violent insurgents and how the challenges of change will be overcome together with the Iraqi people. Great stuff.

Yet the insurgents, in "Falluja, Najaf and elsewhere", are not merely Iraqi resistance. They are indeed the same enemy as the US is fighting in Afghanistan now. They are the same as Taliban and they are also the same as the ones that bombed Madrid. We are to understand, therefore, that because terrorists bombed a night- club in Bali and a railway in Madrid, the US should be applauded in dealing with those incidents now that they're working on the insurgents in Najaf and Falluja, incited by "this young cleric", which currently is the front against the "war on terror" and represent "the enemy" just as well as Taliban or Al- Quida. We are also to understand that the US didn't choose to come to where they are today, but that the war on terror just happened to find them just across the Eufrat somewhere while they were minding their own business.

Oops. I seem to have written something that might be considered a ridicule, yet I have not tried to and I have also kept a pretty strict discipline in not saying anything that the President have not stated himself. A real problem, that.

Still the pragmatic on- site examination is so extremely welcome that I'm going to applaud the President's scriptwriter once again for apparently not disregarding everything in the real world and at least giving an impression that there are, at least now, a plan for how the future government in Iraq is supposed to work, and that the previous reluctance in cooperating with other forces - that is, "them" - is not altogether outside consideration anymore. So if the President would be so kind as to do away with the "the enemy" term as well for everything that apparently does not want a "free Iraq", we would be doing serious headway. Other than that, thank god that Monkeyboy is not the leader of our goverment or I would've been seriously embarassed. What, for instance, posesses the goverment in order to send their representative to have a speech half the world will await with interest and make him say:"The swift removal of Saddam Hussein's regime last spring had an unintended effect: Instead of being killed or captured on the battlefield, some of Saddam's elite guards shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population.". Aha. I guess we know now who to blame for the failures, eh? Or: "The terrorists' only influence is violence, and their only agenda is death. Our agenda, in contrast, is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people.". I suppose that the "only influence is violence" bit was included as a mitigating circumstance, no?