Speech delivered at Princeton University on 7 February 2006 by Mark Bruzonsky – Mark@Bruzonsky.com

Forum Participants: 
Anne- Marie Slaughter – Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton Univerity
Professor Cornell West – Professor, Princeton University
Mark Bruzonsky – Journalist, Woodrow Wilson School MPA, NYU Law School Root-Tilden Scholar JD
VIDEO of Bruzonsky SPEECH  (16 minutes)                            Comments about Speech      
 
Video of entire Forum  (2 hours 7 minutes)   
The entire 350-seat auditorium, one of the largest at Princeton, was filled including the balcony. 
Note: Sound is difficult to hear in opening but then improves. If you adjust and concentrate you can hear just about everything.
Another special speech by Mark Bruzonsky a few years before at Univ of Chicago that led to this one at Princeton:
Keynote Address – Palmer House Hilton Ballroom filled with nearly 3000 high-school students and teachers
 
 
Moderator: Prof Sean Wilentz, Director Program of American Studies, Dept of History
Good Evening.   Nearly all of you will remain here at Princeton in the days to come.  But though I have interesting memories of Princeton I will be
here with you only for a few hours  tonight before going back to imperial Washington tomorrow.
 
So I ask you in the few moments we have together to please allow me to give you my perspective in a clear and admittedly pointed way.  In a sense I’ll also be summarizing what I have learned in about 200 trips abroad since my own student days.  I realize many of you may not agree with or even accept what I have concluded.  But I thank you in advance for the opportunity to be here tonight to join these two distinguished persons who play such important roles at this exceptional university and in our country.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
Though what happened a few years ago on 9/11 was certainly not the start of the conflict that now dominates our lives, the impact it has had on our society, including events here at Princeton, is overreaching.
 
I say it was not the start because one can trace what happened on 9/11 back to many other critical historical events from which it was spawned.  And since he was the President of this University before he came to Washington as President of the country I’ll start by recalling the famous Paris ‘Peace Conference’ of Woodrow Wilson’s time.

Though called a ‘Peace Conference’ the result was anything but.  Back then the victorious Western powers essentially divided the defeated Ottoman Empire into many artificial nation-states and sheikdoms that still remain today.  Then the legitimizing theme was ‘self-determination’ which was not really to be of course… much as today the ad-nauseum but disingenuous themes are ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom.’

It’s crucial to remember that at the time the people of what we Westerners named the Middle East had been promised Independence as an ArabÂ