The White House said President Bush's speech yesterday in Abu Dhabi was the centerpiece address of his six-country, eight-day trip through the Middle East.

So, having dispatched with the news of the speech, which related mostly to Iran, I thought I'd take a look at reaction to the speech.

My own impression was that the president was not as animated as he usually is when talking about the war against terrorism and his freedom agenda. He often raises his voice a notch and gestures strongly when talking about "the ideological struggle of our time," as he puts it.

Mr. Bush spoke inside an enormous auditorium, the Palace Conference Center, at the $3 billion Emirates Palace Hotel. One thought I had was that Mr. Bush, who thrives on crowd interaction, may have felt like his voice and his presence was being swallowed up by the huge space.

Apparently, singer Justin Timberlake didn't have any problems when he performed here last month.

The consensus among my colleagues in the press corp was pretty uniform: the speech was mediocre to terrible. Some faulted the speechwriting, others the delivery, others the substance.

I am no speechwriting expert, but the speech did seem to hop and skip from topic to topic, even if everything fell under the broad umbrella of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. That made it hard to follow, and also sapped the speech of a central thrust.

Enough punditry though. My colleague John McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal labeled the speech "cautious," which is a good way to look at it. The president's immediate audience was the UAE aristocracy, and he couldn't call too plainly for government accountability in a region where strong men rule.

In addition, Mr. Bush must tread carefully when talking about Iran, which is the neighbor to the east of the Gulf States--these smaller countries cannot simply thumb their noses at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Lastly, a note about the Emirates Palace hotel. I was in the president's motorcade when he arrived at the massive structure, and as we rolled down a wide avenue toward the hotel, we could see the front end of the motorcade going up a long ramp to the hotel's top level, which was a sight to take your breath away.

Steve Pike, the US embassy spokesman, said the hotel is one kilometer end to end, and has a white sand beach imported from Algeria. I saw the beach, however, and the sand looked kind of average.

Here are some pictures of the hotel, taken from the road:

-- Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times