Friday, December 14, 2007

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

“[T]he anti-war protesters remain clueless. They’re still planning their marches.

Instead, they should be apologizing.

Before the war, they told us that 500,000 Iraqis would be killed in Dresden-like bombing, that we would precipitate an eco-catastrophe by pushing Saddam to set fire to his oil wells, that millions of people would flee the country, that thousands of our own troops would be killed, that the Arab ‘street’ would rise up, that terrorist attacks would resume ferociously on our homeland, that Iraqis would tenaciously resist our colonization of their land, that we would become bogged down in urban warfare, and on and on.

In fact, none of that has happened. It has been a war unmatched in history, with relatively few civilian and allied casualties and the prime objectives—control of the capital and the destruction of Saddam’s regime—achieved in only a few weeks.

Conscientious opponents of the war should say they were wrong, wrong, wrong—on all counts.”

--James K. Glassman, nominated by President George W. Bush to replace Karen Hughes as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; in his “Peacemongers Should Be Apologizing Not Marching” (Capitalist Magazine, April 14, 2003)

From John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just don't know what to say. This guy is a gazillion times worse a choice than Hughes, who wasn't exactly a star.

We can fall back on the observation that it gets harder to get good people to volunteer in the last year of an administration. The alternative is to have someone who was there already become an "acting."

I think my blog partners, professionals in the field of public diplomacy, are even more speechless at this development.

CKR