Snowcloud: Obama's Afghan strategy
Updated on 02 December 2009
US President Barack Obama says that 30,000 extra soldiers are needed in Afghanistan in order to fight terrorism. Watch the full speech using our interactive Snowcloud.
In a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan Obama set out key objectives which, he said, were crucial in defending the US and other nations against a growing threat of terrorism.
In his speech to the military academy at West Point, New York he also pledged to begin troop withdrawal from July 2011.
Run the cursor over the words below to see how often they appear. Then click the word to see it in the context of the full speech in text and video. You can also skip quickly between all its incidences in the speech.
About Snowclouds
Snowclouds are a Flash application designed by Channel 4 News's senior programme director, Martin Collett. These interactive word clouds condense the text of a speech into one handy, interactive image. The more frequently a word is used during a speech, the bigger it is displayed.
Clicking on the word brings up the transcript of the speech and shows the contexts in which the word was used. The Snowcloud generator ignores common words such as "and", "the" and "there" to get a clearer picture of the distinct content of the speech. As well as any word with fewer than five letters or, those listed here are ignored by this Snowcloud (not all of the words in the list necessarily cropped up in the speech).
