Very interesting and thoughtful speech. Transcript here.

Later: Dave Winer is not impressed. (And he’s an Obama supporter).

Imagine Obama looking into the camera saying “Fuck it, we all know why Bush and McCain want to stay in Iraq. All this talk about waiting for this or that to happen — it’s all bullshit, they know it, I know it, the press knows it, and if you think about it you know it too.”

We’re not going to leave Iraq because if we did, it would become a province of Iran. It’s pretty close to being that now, even with 150K American troops camped out in bases spread through the country. The President, Maliki, is Iranian (for all practical purposes). Al Sadr is Iranian. The only guys who aren’t Iranians are the remnants of Saddam’s government and the guys we call evildoers who call themselves Al Qaeda. They’re all equally evil, and we’re no better. We fucked that country, hard, killed huge numbers of Iraqis, wrecked the country. The Arab world will be cursing us for a long time for what we did to Iraq, and we’ll deserve it.

If we pull out, Iraq and Iran will merge, combine the countries with the 2nd and 3rd largest oil reserves, and a huge army, run by people who are serious and they’re not the idiots the Republicans keep portraying them as. They’re astute politicians, much more sophisticated than Bush or McCain. In the game of chess they’re playing with the US, a country that’s many times its size, they’re pretty close to taking our queen.

The American president who leaves Iraq is going to be blamed for the oil debacle that’s coming (even so, it’ll be unrelated to Iran taking over Iraq). $4.50 a gallon is nothing. It’s going to get a lot worse. Everyone knows it, that’s why the stock market is tanking, why there are runs on the banks, why the govt is furiously printing money to shore them up, which only feeds more inflation.

The lines at banks with people waiting to draw out all their money aren’t being shown on TV, cause if everyone knew what was going on the panic would likely turn into a 1929-like collapse.

Outside the US no one wants to call us on our bullshit because we have this huge army, navy, air force, with aircraft carriers, bases all over the world, and an unbelievably huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. If we get scared enough we might just use em. That’s the only reason the Saudis are willing to still meet with Cheney, and why they keep sending us oil which we pay for with dollars that they all know are a joke.

Obama knows this. He can’t leave Iraq and he won’t. Of course McCain won’t either. He was actually telling the truth when he said we’d be there for 100 years. We will, if we can. Obama can’t and won’t change that.