I watched parts of Bashshar's speech. If there is an antonym to charisma, Bashshar has it, in large amounts. He is sharp but humorless, and comes across as lacking in sympathy and humanity. He has an excellent command of the language, but comes across as supercilious. But the speech is important in one regard: it brings to the open, yet again, the acute Syrian-Saudi conflict. I had written before that the Saudi-Syrian conflict is not the result of the Hariri assassination, but the converse is true. After the assassination, the conflict came to the open, before it was clamped down on by the Saudi King following the defection of Khaddam and his interview on AlArabiya TV. The Israeli war on Lebanon could not suppress this conflict anymore, it seems. The most "honest" trends of Saudi foreign policy can now be gleaned from Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat, the most right-wing, pro-Bush Saudi newspaper. House of Saud versus the Ba`th: how can you support either. And Bashshar's reference to his rivals as "the half-men" is quite sexist (it is derived from a speech of `Ali ibn Abi Talib who talked about the "likes of men, no men").