It wasn’t a great speech. He stumbled a bit here and there, it didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, and it wasn’t a thing of Churchill-esque beauty. What it was, though, was a necessary thing to remind the country of why we went to Iraq, what we hope to do there, and why we are neither leaving now nor invading with all the manpower that America can muster. It was also a good reminder for us to say thank you to all of the professional, talented men and women who make up our military.

That is to say, the speech was the success it needed to be.

I have to admit that it was also gratifying to see the speech held on a military base, and an absolute pleasure to hear a speech that wasn’t interrupted by 50 applause points.

In other news, the United States and the United Kingdom have been waging a secret war against Zimbabwe.

A state-run newspaper in Zimbabwe has suggested the UK and US are to blame for droughts in southern Africa.

The Herald said climate change has been artificially induced “in a bid to arm-twist the region to capitulate to the whims of the world’s superpowers”.

It said weather was being manipulated for political gain using unspecified “unconventional” chemical weapons.

For shame, us.

Of course, it might also be that the state (and, by extension, the state controlled media) finds itself in the embarrassing situation of having to explain why Mugabe predicted that Zim’s moribund farm industry was going to produce so much maize this year that they would be exporting the stuff. Every NGO that tracks such things, of course, knew that Mugabe’s disastrous farm policies were going to leave Zimbabwe in a desperate situation and began an early begathon for food aid to the ruined nation.

Nah. That’s ridiculous. It has to be weather control and conspiracy.

(Thanks to Nathan for feeding me this wonderful story.)

Update: Here’s a good round-up of reactions to the speech. Like the right-wing shill that he is, though, he ignores the evidence of the Anglosphere’s secret war against Robert Mugabe’s brave revolution.