Posted on 11/20/2004 11:21:23 AM PST by baseball_fan
Natan Sharansky surely numbers among the foremost champions of freedom of recent times. A leading voice of Soviet dissent during the 1970’s, he was largely responsible for transforming the demand that Soviet Jews be allowed to emigrate to Israel into the most influential protest movement in Soviet history. As a prisoner in the gulag, charged by the Kremlin with treason, Sharansky became a leading symbol of resistance to totalitarian brutality.
...Sharansky’s case for what amounts to a refashioning of the Middle East’s political culture
...The need for stability, Sharansky concluded, is one of the most misused arguments in political life. “In its name,” he writes, “autocrats are embraced, dictators are coddled, and tyrants are courted.”
...he advocates the creation of an entirely new institution, consisting exclusively of democratic states, as an alternative to the tyrant-infested United Nations.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
The realism of the past - the embracing of dictators and totalitarian regimes in the belief that it promoted our strategic interests aka "stability" - gave us 9/11.
Maybe Bush could talk to his buddies in the Saudi royal family about bringing "democracy" to that country...
You're kidding right? At this moment, it would be suicide for the West.
But I'm not going to hold my breath and wait for this administration (or any other, for that matter) to press the Saudi's to move in that direction.
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