Bush gave an exrtaordinary speech last Tuesday. In effect he said little that was new to a audience that only cheered once. Let me repeat that - once. Normally a military audience such as that at Fort Bragg would cheer every syllable out of blind loyalty, but this time Bush was met with an echoing silence.

Assertions that the Iraq forces are being trained at a rate of knots do not stand up to scrutiny, those that have been trained are unreliable, unproven and ill-equipped. Many of these so called trained units have undergone courses lasting weeks, whereas even under Saddam soldiers took three years to train. The number of trained units that Bush and his clones quote include those that have already deserted and those that do not bother to turn up for duty and just collect their pay check. What's important is what Bush didn't say, once again he cannot bring himself to tell the American people the truth, a truth that the rest of us have been trumpeting since before this mad folly of Iraq. American troops will be in Iraq for years and thousands more will die. American troops still do not have the armoured vehicles they need to combat the ever increasingly effective IEDs deployed by the enemy - whoever they are. For there are now four loosely affiliated groups of people in Iraq challenging the occupying forces: Nationalists, terrorists such as Zarqawi, Saddam loyalists and ordinary criminal gangs.

He didn't mention that his administration had been negotiating with 'insurgents' as Rumsfeld suddenly terms them - terrorists when they are attacking the US army, insurgents when they are negotiating with the US army. He did mention 9/11 six times, even though everyone knows that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. By repeating this time and again he hopes that the American people will believe 'my propaganda' as he cheerfully admits. But 60% of people no longer believe that and that number is growing.

He also made an extraordinary claim that Al'Qaeda had made Iraq the central front in the battle against terrorism without mentioning that it was he and he alone that opened up this front, a front that was not planned for. The plan was to have a mere 30,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2003, not to be bogged down, cowering in bunkers across an unsecure Iraq. His claims, and those of others, that they'd rather be fighting terrorists in Iraq rather than in the US is based on an extreme ignorance of what is happening on the ground. As one observer put it, it's like shooting yourself in the foot and saying, right now we have to stop the gangrene and when we do, you'll see that I was right to shoot myself in the foot in the first place. Because by comitting too few troops to Iraq, something that I and hundreds of others commented on ahead of the invasion, and thereby failing to secure Iraq and her borders, it means that hundreds if not thousands of anti-American jihadists can now almost walk to Iraq to attack Americans. Before, they had to glower at home and rage ineffectually at their powerlesness. Now they can practice their urban warfare skills on Americans and then go home and cause havoc there.

The profile of the 9/11 attackers was that of largely well educated, well off, well connected people, not poor madrass trained jihadists with no ability to attack the great Satan. When Al'Qaeda strikes again, for they will, it won't be with the trainees graduating today in the killing fields of Iraq, courtesy of Bush. It will be with operatives that are already in place, already trained or being trained elsewhere. Bush failed to mention that Zarqawi's bunch only affiliated themselves to Al'Qaeda last december. Bush also failed to mention that his folly has created vastly more terrorists than there were before the occupation.

Bush also failed to mention another failed state, Afghanistan, where just two days ago some 17 troops were killed when their helicopter was shot down by the Taleban - the who? Yup, the Taleban, remember them? They're up and running and recruiting again, why? Because three years on nothing has been achieved outside of Kabul, the countryside is in anarchic freefall, a failied narcotic state with the second worst educational system in the world. It's another fine example of imposing democracy by the bullet and the bomb. This is what the Iraqis can look forward to as they peer with trepidation into their future. With oil and electricity still not back to pre-war levels, tens of billions of dollars of debt to service, mass unemployment, malnutrition, the middle classes (doctors and teachers) leaving in droves, kidnappings and random acts of lethal violence, small wonder that so many Americans doubt that Bush's plans have much merit at all.

Nor did Bush mention the US kidnapping and detaining and torture of children in her gulags, one of whom was as young as eight and held without access to his parents for 18 months. Nor did he mention the 10,000 ghost detainees holed up in torture chambers around the world many totally innocent. Nor did he mention the plights of those serving their third terms in Iraq, the devastation on their families, the increased divorce rate, up by 300% among those serving, the tens of thousands of horribly wounded flown home at night away from the cameras, the ban on filming body bags returning to the US in secret. The plummeting recruitment rate? Not a thing.

Nor when he claimed that there was 'no higher calling' than a career in the military did he mention that there was indeed a higher calling - a pointless death in a pointless war.

yechydda,