I suppose those of you who didn't catch Bush's speech in Cleveland today have read the transcript by now. You haven't? What has this country come to when people ignore a President's speech! Back in the day we used to sit around the radio when...Oh well. Long time ago.

Anyway, the "meat" of Bush's speech was a long rambling account of the wonderful things we have accomplished in Talafar. It, according to Bush, has been liberated and freed, turned from darkness to light, etc.

As a coincidence, Professor Juan Cole, professor of history of the University of Michigan, in his blog, Informed Comment, at:

http://www.juancole.com/

happened to list this morning the Talafar operation as one of the top ten catastrophes of the third year of American Iraq. Since you are already familiar, I'm sure, with what Bush said in his speech, here's Professor Cole's description of the Talafar operation:

"The US military used Kurdish and Shiite troops to attack the northern Turkmen city of Talafar in August. Kurdish troops, drawn from the Peshmerga militia, were allowed to paint lasers on targets in the city, which were then destroyed by the US air force. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and much of the population was displaced for some time. Shiite troops and local Shiite Turkmen informants were used to identify and interrogate alleged Sunni insurgents. Turkey was furious at the attack on ethnically related Turkmen and threatened to halt its cooperation with the US. Although the attack was allegedly undertaken to capture foreign forces allegedly based in the city, only 50 were announced apprehended. The entire operation ended up looking like a joint Kurdish-Shiite attack on Sunni Turkmen, backed by the US military. Turkmen and Kurds do not generally get along, and Turkmen accuse Kurds of wanting to ethnically clense them from Kirkuk. The entire operation was politically the worst possible public relations for the US in northern Iraq, and seems unlikely to have put a signficant dent in the guerrillas' capabilities"