First, check out the NY Times editorial penned by John Kerry (or, ghost-written for him, anyway), from yesterday morning, about what Bush should have said.^* It's full of stuff that even I can recognize as bad advice, e.g., "Iraq, of course, badly needs a unified national army, but until it has one - something that our generals now say could take two more years - it should make use of its tribal, religious and ethnic militias like the Kurdish pesh merga and the Shi'ite Badr Brigade to provide protection and help with reconstruction." No. No. That's hardly going to encourage any promotion of unity, allowing sectarian groups to accumulate power. Also, Kerry still seems to be running on that technocratic "We can win if we do things right" path. E.g. his needlessly phallic statement, "We're doing our part: our huge military presence stands between the Iraqi people and chaos, and our special forces protect Iraqi leaders," belies the fact that most of the chaos is a result of the American occupation (and, err, we don't appear to be doing a good job of protecting Iraqi leaders).

For some light entertainment, read the angry screeds written in response to Kerry's editorial. This one seems to have been written by a monkey with a typewriter.

Finish off with Juan Cole's, err, fisking of Bush's speech.

Don't bother with the speech itself. He doesn't say anything you haven't heard before.

---

^* I apologize. The tense I want to use here doesn't seem to exist in English.