Speech

Tonight's words by the President played like a greatest hits reel of his new approach honed over the last several weeks: a tone of conciliation and acknowledgement, a vow that other voices will be listened to, and then a forging ahead of the exact same policy that got us into this mess in the first place. It's so easy to placate the Beltway media establishment: just throw a few rhetorical nods at bipartisanship their way and they salivate. In truth, the sum total of the speech was "We're doing what we've been doing, what we've been doing is working, so shut up and trust me.

Meanwhile those fair and free elections on Thursday may not have been altogether fair or free:

Suspected polling violations on voting day last week far exceeded the number in Iraq's first election in January, local and international monitors said yesterday.
On the deadline for filing complaints, the number of alleged violations which could swing results in the 275-seat parliament was "well into double figures", an accredited international election observer, who wished to remain anonymous, said.
...

Secular Arab parties have accused the Shia religious bloc, which dominates the current government, of intimidating voters in Baghdad and many southern cities.

At the Sharqia high school in central Baghdad, which was used as a polling station, a senior election official was said to have asked voters if they were going to vote for 555. Unless they said yes, they were not given ballot papers.

A source close to Mr Allawi's campaign said that in one Baghdad polling station "around 600 men, some with walkie-talkies and purple ink on their fingers showing they had already voted, forced their way in. When the manager tried to stop them asking for ballot papers, they threatened to put him in a car boot and drive him away ... He let them in."

It seems to me that these allegations are by and large coming from the groups BushCo wants to win in Iraq; namely, from "secular Arab" Iyad Allawi's group.

It must be a "my God, what have we wrought" moment for them to realize that we've ended up giving Iran a theocratic partner in the region, but we have to praise those theocrats who worked to put this "Democracy in name only" in place. I thought Sen. Lindsay Graham's acknowledgement on CNN after the speech that the Badr Brigade Shiite militias basically control the Interior Ministry was very salient (you didn't hear that IN the speech, by the way). This is the worst possible outcome from my standpoint; that we have to keep grinning and stating "freedom's on the march" while the Shiite ruling class settles scores with Sunnis, messes with elections to consolidate power, and crushes dissent underfoot.

Now, what government currently in power in North America does that sound like...