October 11, 2005

Bennington College welcomes Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, on Sunday, October 16, 2005, at 8:30 pm. The public is invited to come hear him speak in Usdan Gallery in the College's Visual and Performing Arts Center (VAPA).  The lecture is free.

Mr. Diamond is co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy and coordinates the Democracy Program of the new Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford, where he is also a professor by courtesy of political science and sociology.

Although Mr. Diamond opposed the invasion of Iraq, his former Stanford colleague, then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, asked him to go to Iraq to advise Ambassador Paul Bremer on Iraq's struggle toward democracy. While there early last year, he served as senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.  In Squandered Victory, Diamond uses his experience to trace the political vacuum created after the fall of Saddam Hussein and recount all the mistakes made in Iraq from that point on.

Mr. Diamond's speech is the opening address for Learning Democracy, a three-day conference for which Bennington College will host distinguished leaders and scholars from five nations that have undergone a noteworthy democratic transition: Argentina, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, and Turkey. Mr. Diamond's remarks will set the stage for the following in-depth discussion.