Posted on 01/28/2011 6:29:12 PM PST by kristinn
"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"... "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
...But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right - and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy.
U.S. officials talked to Mubarak plenty in 2009 and 2010, and even talked to the far more repressive President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but they talked about their goals for Israeli-Palestinian peace and ignored the police states outside the doors of those presidential palaces. When the Iranian regime stole the June 2009 elections and people went to the streets, the Obama administration feared that speaking out in their support might jeopardize the nuclear negotiations. The "reset" sought with Russia has been with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, not the Russian people suffering his increasingly despotic and lawless rule.
This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration's approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning to rebel against those rulers....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Elliot Abrams is an idiot... Democracy in the Arab World will only bring Islamists to power. Its not freedom and Coca Cola they want!
The WashPost must be pretty darn dumb if they think the new government is going to be more free
Who's behind these protests? Is it a group wanting to form an Iraqi style democracy? Or is the The Muslim Brotherhood fermenting revolt to form a Taliban or al Q type of muslim kingdom?
Freedom and Islam are incompatible.
Which, of course, brings and immediate death to anything resembling democratic governing.
I hope so, but I’ll comment in a couple of years, let’s see who takes power first.
It was the intention of W’s administration to change the dynamic in the Middle east to make democracy possible. No question about it.
Read Isaiah 19:1-4...quite interesting.
You can be sure that whatever the intention of the protesters, if the MB rides this wave to power, Egypt will be a radical Islamic state. Maybe not this year but sometime in this decade it will happen.
Fixed it for Elliott.
“A different take on this week’s events.”
Did you catch Savage’s take on this?
He compares it to the radical Muslims taking control of Iran, and creating a disaster.
Exactly.
Even the protests were full of barbarians calling out the same Islamic war cries that the terrorists call out.
This is just another attempt to raise a Muslim caliphate.
Eliot Abrams is an idiot NeoCon
What freedom? These rioters are comminist-socialists at best. At worst and most probably they are hardcore Islamists.
That is a kind of freedom Iran got expelling Shah. Waiting for a US embassy to burn.
I certainly prefer an Arab world opressed by moderate dictators. Their societies are a pots of snakes, they yet to learn how to handle libertiess.
I’m withholding comment for the same reason. The media likes to throw around the “Muslim Brotherhood” threat, but I’ve seen little detailed reporting on who or what the protesters are actually protesting and/or supporting.
But, as far as I can see, the meltdown in Egypt and the takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood is exactly what Obama wants.
“Mubarak took the same tack for three decades. Ruling under an endless emergency law, he has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect created a two-party system - his ruling National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood - and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election would bring the Islamists to power.”
Too bad so many FReepers are as short sighted as Zero. We musn’t upset the Mullahs, and tin pot dictators. It could be destabilizing.
Wow the left is in full support radical Islam mode. Call it an uprising of the people instead of an organized effort, decades or centuries old, to establish Islamic states.
I agree. The ME seems only to be capable of a dictatorship or a theocracy.
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