Who said this ..? Weekend reading

Two quotations for you, long and short.  Who said these things?

1.  … a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.  We don’t want that…. The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives – developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way … the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves … it’s something only you could do.   

2.  Despite employing some of the best and brightest analysts in the world, the advice given by the US State Department over the last fifty years could comfortably have been outperformed by a parrot that had been trained to repeat the phrase ‘Don’t start a war’. 

The first, of course, is Trump.  One could give many more quotations from that speech:  “my greatest hope is to be a peacemaker and to be a unifier. I don’t like war  /  my greatest hope is to be a peacemaker and a unifier  /  far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins” etc etc, and feel like applauding it.

Ho hum.  Trump talks a lot, and even the scripted speeches like the one above incorporate the usual mendacious, vainglorious narcissism which makes one glad one isn’t a US military cadet, forced to listen to him and realise he’s the Commander in Chief.  Here are a couple, if you have the time: the first, from May last year, is actually the source of 1. above but this other, from November, is truly embarrassing and has virtually no redeeming features whatever.  The judgmental decline had really set in by then, and it’s only linked to here by way of illustration of how bad things are.

Yes, the prescient parrot of quote #2 has been well and truly stuffed.  (It’s from a writer called Dan Davies in The Unaccountability Machine.)

ND