After listening to Dubbya's speech lauded to the rafters by commentators this morning as the most statesmanlike speech ever by a US president, I'm baffled.
To me it sounded like a collection of cheap-jack soundbites cobbled together by a Madison Avenue hack, designed to evoke suitable resonances of Churchill, Lincoln and Roosevelt but sounding flat, woolly and almost Blair-like in its vacuity.
Even the delivery seemed to me to be as statesmanlike as a "speak your weight" machine.
And to ask countries "are you with us or against us" is pointless rhetoric. Look at poor Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. He has probably signed his own death warrant by agreeing to support US action in a limited way, so plenty of other national leaders can probably be forgiven for equivocating there.
And across the world there can be countries avowedly against terrorism, but also against the sort of action that results in 30,000 deaths in Nicaragua, or the reign of terror in Chile, or the arrest of Nelson Mandela, or the refusal to extradite an IRA bomber.
Grrr.
Better lay in plenty of tins of Spam and batteries!