Bush's speech of reassurance.

and under the suit, no doubt transparent :wink:

It is believed that other leading members of the administration and half the voters thought so.

My only mild criticism was at the end of his speech when he said "May God bless our country. (Applause.)"

The remaining voters might have preferred "May God help our country."

Cruel, but brilliant.!

Archbishop

.

Thought what? They were more likely thinking is why did we let this dummy get us in this mess.

I saw the speech on TV and was quite impressed with the first half (and I'm no lover of Bush) but by the time he got to the conclusion it was clear that it was written in the same way you'd write any persuasive communication...

You write the stuff the reader wants to hear at the beginning and then you say the important stuff (we'll keeps the troops there as long as we need to [but Iraq will be a sovereign nation] and we're gonna keep fighting the bad guys) and then you close with something nice (God bless...).

I was impressed with how he spoke for the most part - he is slowly becoming a better speaker. Good thing nobody was asking questions - that's when he gets into trouble.

For the most part it appeared to be a lot of words to say that we're going to stay the course.

In a little over a month Iraq will be a sovereign nation. Should the leaders of this allegedly sovereign nation decide that the US is no longer needed and tell Mr. Bush to
pack up his implements of war and leave? Would he? And if the US were to agree to that demand and leave would a civil war between the Shia of the South, Sunni of central Iraq and the Kurds of the North be in the offing. In addition if we refused what than does sovereighty mean.

and you can bet yur ass there will be no straightforward answers to your questions forthcoming.

those reason's would lead me to believe that the US will not be asked to leave.

One of those ironies observed in this thread:

The one thing the left wingers liked about Bush's speech was that he was planning to close Abu Ghraib prison.

That's the one thing the Iraqis most disliked about the speech. They think they should be the ones to decide whether the prison will be closed and/or torn down.

I agree with the Iraquis

Destroying the prison is something I never thought the administration would do. When I was a kid, I fell of my bike once and it made me mad. I ran up and kicked the bike. My Dad saw me do it and told me that taking revenge on inanimate objects was a sign of insanity. I've never forgotten that, so it has always bothered me to see other people do it. One great example is ... well, I don't want to be known as Johnny One Note so I won't say it. Anyway, if the prison is inadequate and outdated and an example of the bad things that happened during Saddam's administration, then let's get rid of it. Or let's build a new one and allow the Iraqis to decide what happens to it. But if we want to demolish it only because of the prisoner abuse that happened inside, I think that's a pretty high-priced apology.

Critics, supporters assess Bush speech



Tuesday, May 25, 2004 Posted: 12:53 PM EDT (1653 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Critics on Tuesday said President Bush was short on specifics in his speech Monday night concerning the future of Iraq, but defenders said the details will be left for Iraqis to decide and the address showed the United States does have a plan for their future.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry -- in a written statement released just after the speech -- said President Bush "laid out general principles tonight, most of which we've heard before" on Iraq and the June 30 handover of power there. (The Bush speech: 'Difficult days' won't halt Iraq's progress)
Kerry challenged Bush "to genuinely reach out to our allies so the United States doesn't have to continue to go it alone and to create the stability necessary to allow the people of Iraq to move forward." (Kerry promotes energy plan)
Biden, Powell

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- Sen. Joseph Biden -- said President Bush left many questions unanswered about who will provide and pay for Iraq's security.
"He didn't say who's going to send more troops," Biden said.
"He didn't say who's going to pay more money. Now, maybe we're going to hear in the next speech that he has done what many of us have called for, that he's actually used presidential leadership, actually talked to the heads of heads of state, actually talked to Mr. Putin, actually talked to our allies, actually talked to NATO, actually got those heads of state on the phone and gotten actual commitments."
Biden, D-Delaware, said Bush should provide more details of how the U.S. will train 35,000 Iraqi soldiers.
"All his experts have said to him as well as me it would take three years to do that," Biden said. "He didn't say that he was going to take up France and Germany on their offer to train them in Europe. He didn't say he was going to speed up the training in Arab nations where Americans have trained Arab forces."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell -- in a television interview Tuesday morning -- said the president's speech "put forward our comprehensive plan to return full sovereignty to the Iraqi people."
"This is what people have wanted, and they're going to see it on the 30th of June as the Coalition Provisional Authority comes to an end, and on the first of July when a new interim Iraqi government takes over," Powell said.
Chambliss, Mahmassani

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, said the speech wasn't intended to give "the details of any presidential plan or administration plan to provide for the future of the Iraqi people. What the president said all along is that the Iraqi people are going to decide that."
"His critics over the last several weeks have been saying the president has no plan," Chambliss said.
"Well, tonight he spelled out the plan we've been operating under and that we're going to move forward with to create an independent Iraq and turn the government of Iraq over to the Iraqi people."
"We started this for the right reasons," Chambliss said. "We're on the right track. It is a very, very difficult and complex track. But in order to get there, it is going to require the presence of Americans for probably a long time to come. You'll see us downsize, I hope, immediately. But it is still going require us to be there for a while to come."
Ambassador. Yahya Mahmassani of the League of Arab States said Bush's address was "essentially the same statement we have heard before, except now actually the speech gives a general outline."
"We didn't see any specifics," Mahmassani said. "We didn't see any timetable for the withdrawal of the American forces and I think essentially the situation in Iraq is getting from bad to worse."
Mahmassani said Bush should provide a better definition of what Iraqi sovereignty will be.
"There is no definition regarding the relationship between the multinational forces and the interim government," he said.
"Who exercises the authority? Who has the upper hand? Suppose the multinational forces under an American general order a military action and the interim government says no. Now who has the upper hand here?"

After the speechLink

Tarantulas
Please pardon my language but that article and a wet dream have much in common.

Bush's five-week 'Monday Night Live'

By Daniel Schorr

WASHINGTON – In a manipulation of symbols, President Bush calls for razing the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Welcome to Monday Night Live, a series of television speeches intended to raise our spirits and his poll ratings on the road to the transfer of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30.
But there have been depressing developments.
The investigations of prisoner abuse are going further, and they are going higher. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the military police brigade that ran the prison, has been suspended. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, is to be replaced, although the Pentagon insists it's a routine rotation. General Sanchez denies assertions from within the ranks that he attended one or more prisoner interrogations.
Just as pictures and videotape sparked the prison scandal, so too have pictures sprouted in northern Iraq to embarrass the US military command. The Army asserts that an air attack that killed more than 40 Iraqis was aimed at a safe house used by foreign fighters. But the videotape of the ruin shows musical instruments and pots and pans, supporting the local assertion that the attack was on a wedding party.
A mystifying breach has developed between US administrator Paul Bremer and Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's longtime favorite son and beneficiary of millions in American taxpayer dollars. Mr. Chalabi's home and office were raided by American-backed Iraqi police, files and computers taken away. Word was leaked that he had shared American military secrets with Iran, No. 2 on the "axis of evil" list. Chalabi saturated the Sunday talk shows with the claim that the CIA was trying to smear him.
All of this contributes to a sense of confusion and uncertainty as June 30 approaches. The latest insider book to dump on the administration's planning for the war and its aftermath is by retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni. On CBS's "60 Minutes" he asserted, "The course is headed over Niagara Falls.... It should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up."
Testifying before a Senate committee, Gen. Joseph Hoar, former chief of US Central Command, said, "I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure.... We are looking into the abyss."
But, never mind. The president will have more cheerful words for us next Monday.

Yes Daniel Shorr is definitly a righty...

When I was a child I thought as a child and now that I am president. UM. I still think as a child.
Yours in ignorance
G Bush

W's blind to the
Iraqi reality show





On a recent Sunday, four men, stripped to their underpants, were paraded through a city on the back of a pickup truck. They were escorted by scores of masked men shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God Is Great"), and their backs were bleeding from the 80 lashes each had received for selling alcohol.
Where did this happen? Fallujah, the Iraqi city described by President Bush in the most serene terms in his address at the Army War College the other night. He mentioned the city when he said military commanders had exercised commendable restraint in not leveling the place after American contractors were killed and hung from a bridge.

"We're making security a shared responsibility in Fallujah," the President told the nation. "Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force, which is now patrolling the city."

But The Associated Press offers a different picture. The President's "all-Iraqi security force" has allowed Fallujah to become "an Islamic ministate" - complete with floggings and the usual restrictions on women. In this manner, it has been liberated from both the secular Saddam Hussein and the democratic Americans.

The contrast between what the President said and what The AP reported is jarring, but it is also somewhat typical.

In speaking of Iraq as the centerpiece of his war on terror, he made no mention of the apparent fact that the war has proved a boon to terrorists. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the war has been a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Foreign fighters have infiltrated Iraq - maybe as many as 1,000 of them - where they have been able to inflict casualties on American forces. They have suckered the U.S. into the sort of guerrilla war we tried to avoid. In this respect, Iraq could wind up being an ambush.

America is trapped. Having gone into Iraq, we cannot now pull out. Without an American military presence, Iraq almost certainly would fall into chaos, a bloody civil war that might well draw in its neighbors. Bad could turn out to be much worse.

It's hard to feel confident that the Bush administration is prepared for the challenge. It has been unforgivingly incompetent so far, layering contradictory facts with Sunday school rhetoric. Fallujah, a compromised compromise, becomes a sterling success in the President's mouth. Ahmad Chalabi, the erstwhile George Washington of Iraq, becomes Benedict Arnold virtually overnight.

The Bush administration's rap on John Kerry is that he is inconsistent. The President's virtue, on the other hand, is supposedly his consistency. But to stick to the same rhetoric when the facts have changed, to insist on what is palpably false, to render black as white and to say it all with a childlike faith in civics class bromides is not commendable consistency.

It is, instead, the mark of a narrow mind overwhelmed by large events.