Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Love thy Rummy

Friend of mine reminded me of some classic rummy from a press conference a few weeks back (11/8/2004). Thought I'd pass along.

Rummy: Listen, these folks are determined. These are killers - they chop people's heads off. They are getting money from around the world. They are getting recruits ...

Reporter: ... but are we going to see a number of Fuluja-type invasions as they go city to city or do you think that you can squelch a lot of the insurgency today or this week?

Rummy: We've answered that, but let me repeat it because it's important. No one can know the answer to that question. We can know of certain knowledges that you can not have a country that is free and democratic and respectable of all of the people in the country if you have safe havens for people who go around chopping people's heads off. You can't have a country if that's the case. Therefore, the government, and those assisting it, in this case the coalitiontent people think that is an option and try to do that, they will find it is not an option. The only option that exists for those folks is to decide that they have a stake in the future of that country and to become a part of the political process. And when I use this phrase tipping, people don't go from here over to there. They move this way and that way just a slight bit, and pretty soon the overwhelming majority are over in this area - recognizing that that's the future. The future is not a dark future of cutting people's heads off. The future's a bright future for them, where they can participate in it. They might not have exactly the same degree of control they had previously, because it won't be a dictatorship. Well, too bad. It's a different world.

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