[applause] good afternoon. The telling of history is consequential and recognition is consequential also. I am deeply honored and appreciated to receive the american book award today. I am also very honored to share it with the other recipients today who have presented such rot and real engagements for social life. Not the least it is also quite an honor to share the award with previous recipients, some of the people who shaped my intellectual development. Kerry snyder, edwards i eat, and very baraka. I want to thank first of all waldo martin column aye author. We spent many years together working on this vote. I want to thank my friends and family in the audience in my many comrades and colleagues who helped make this poker reality along the way. There are too many to thank individually. You know who you are and i never could have dreamed of getting here without you. Thank you. The recognition is nice, or writing the history of the black interparty let alone the 12 years that, but the
But, you know, without an american advisory effort and american units to partner with, theres no one there to oversee bad commanders, to say this guy needs to be relieved. When we were there, for instance, maliki removed every single bedivide commander in the Brigade Commander in the National Police and twothirds of the [inaudible] some of them twice. So we forced accountability on the state. But when we removed that check on malikis baser tendencies, he was able to do whatever he wanted to do starting with the attempted arrest of the Vice President of the state of iraq. And just to follow up on that , maliki has his own set of Political Considerations only some of which are to have an effective fighting force and some of which are to create Patronage Networks and all those sorts of things. One of the things that was interesting to me about your account of the charge of the knights is it wasnt clear to me whether maliki thought the u. S. Was actually vital in his inning. And maliki may
Thank you for coming on such a chilly day, and im delighted to present perhaps 25, 30 minutes of comments and the interaction with you on the questions you have. Im also very glad to see jim phillips here. Ive worked on terrorism issues with jim for it must be a quarter century now, and there are very few people that write with the intelligence and prudence that jim phillips does. Heres a couple reasons why i wanted to write this book, with the way terrorism encounters the citizen. I remember back in 1980 reading some clippings many newspapers, it was in newspapers, it was in the chicago area. And a woman was looking out her window near her home, and she saw a van pull up. And in that van there proved to be some nine different people. And they looked rather like an athletics team, you know . The jogging uniforms and the bags. But as she looked out her window, this lady, mrs. Walter jacobson, decides that she should be a little nervous about this. Thered been some robberies in the area
Possibilities. My own office at the state department has had a pretty consistent budget thanks to the congress to support Civil Society actors in a variety of countries and, of course, the National Endowment for democracy remains the pree moore institution in the world premier institution in the world for targeting assistance to democrats usually many tough places. So they know they have support from the outside community, from the International Community. So let me mention a couple of things just to wind up this opening scene setter. One is that i think we in the United States need to appreciate the Important Role that congress plays. While we disparage its occasional polarization and inability to resolve certain major things, the congress has been a major contributor to american democracy programming in a lot of ways. Not least in the creation of my part of the state department. You know, the bureau for democracy, human rights and labor was created 30 years ago over the objections of