We can't really claim to be blameless or fully magnanimous, but reading someone's comments on the speech, I am a bit struck that we helped get Egypt back the Sinai with a nice annual payoff, helped push the Russians out of Afghanistan, helped ease the Shah out the door, pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait, fought in Somalia to try to calm things down, went into Bosnia and Kosovo to protect the people, complained loudly and initally somewhat effectively about Chechnya, and even have government broadcasts for freedom to the Muslim region now known as western China. And yet we're always giving these speeches saying, "hey, we really don't hate Muslims". For a nation built on marketing, we're really bad at PR. In fact, our Middle East efforts are really expensive bad PR. Bush even sent an accomplished PR agent on top of Karen Hughes and Condi Rice, and all of them came across ridiculously flat. And now, with change, a speech that consists largely of, "yeah, we've really got a lot of great accomplished Muslims" without naming one (okay, Keith Ellison, whoopdie), a speech that pretends we have no power designs on the rest of the world, a speech whose center point seems to be explaining something that should have been obvious quite some time ago, that 9/11 pissed us off, so much that we lost our heads and invaded Iraq. Oh wait, he didn't quite say that, did he? No, I think there was something about fighting for their freedom. I don't know. Maybe if we didn't drive expensive gas guzzlers, we wouldn't have to be coming up with such transparent nonsense to deal with the Middle East, and we wouldn't have to pretend to be at war with Islam. After all, Morocco was way cool in the 60's, Malaysia used to be a William Gibson cyberpunk fantasy, Indonesia? What can I say, give me 5 years there on the beach. Lebanon (without the civil war) - ooh la la, the cuisine, the cafés. Turkey? Fantastisch, has it all. The Gulf States have become party & money countries. Ignore Syria, insignificant, the only countries we have issues with are Iraq, Iran, Saudi and Libya. That's it. And Saudis are mostly our allies, even if they're a bit stiff. So 3 countries. Pakistan-India's just sibling rivalry, nothing much to do with us, they're mostly British anyway, think of it as football hooliganism. Afghanistan's irrelevant without Al Qaeda training camps. Tunisia, great vacation spot. Algerians? All up in Paris & Morocco now playing Rai music, France's issue, and mostly they just want jobs. Nigeria? Keep the oil flowing, that's all anyone needs to know. So why 55 minutes of explaining? Could have just brought in Rachid, "Rock El Casbah". Ein Volk, ein Kultur, it's all hip-hop now anyway. We've been enchanted with this part of the world ever since the time of Alexander. About time we figured out how to get down with it.

PS - Brilliant, I guess the keywords triggered off an ad campaign for "The International Muslim Matrimonials Site". "7 Brides for 7 Brothers", I suppose, down ol' Al Qahira way. Sing a song about them Sabine women, back when musicals were musicals and politically correct was something for the McCarthy hearings.

PPS - Also strange that the 'g' got lopped of "Assessing" in deriving the post URL - I guess Hassan-I Sabbāh has his eye on me, better make myself scarce. Who needs Alamont when we have Alamut? Who needs TV when we got T-Rex? Just call me Isma'il.

Red Cross