I am glad I did not spend time last night listening to the President. I read his entire speech this morning and there was nothing noteworthy in it. As the Paper of Record observes:

This was the week in which Americans hoped they would get straight talk and clear thinking on Iraq. What they got was two exhausting days of Congressional testimony by the American military commander, hours of news conferences and interviews, clouds of cut-to-order statistics and a speech from the Oval Office — and none of it either straight or clear.

New York Time ? No Exit, No Strategy

The presentation was carefully constructed. In fact it was so carefully constructed that one can almost see the speech writer’s outline in the paragraph breaks. It is carefully constructed to tell us that we are fighting the evil empire of the twenty-first century. The word “al Qaeda” appears 12 times by my count and “terrorists” occurs 9. The President had a better platform for driving public opinion when Saddam Hussein was reigning. At least then he had someone who was arguably a “bad man” (although why we want to topple this one “bad man” when there are so many around the world, but that for another day). Using the platform that we need to be nation-building in Iraq and that our young men and women need to die for it is a weak position. Likewise, arguing that a reduction of 7,900, or 4.68%, constitutes a move of substance is insulting. It will be the middle of next year, if then, before there is as much as a 25% reduction.

All this seems to be a move to numb the public to the eventual adoption of a permanent US presence in Iraq. It is akin to the strategy used with gas prices: spike prices — public groans — drop prices a bit — rinse and repeat. The net result is that it will become a fact of life that there are troops stationed in Iraq. The death of US soldiers is already an event of no significance in the general day-to-day life of most Americans. The President’s speech simply moved us further down this road.