Personally, I was relieved to hear a better speech than
usual from Bush, making good use of semantics designed to revitalize the disgruntled
taxpayer. As we enter the holiday
season, what could be more effective with voters than appealing to a higher
mission and raising the spirit of democracy? However, even as this commentary today dissects the reality
from the rhetoric, only half the domestic audience believes even his rare good
speeches are genuine. It’s really too bad, but former oilmen and a Cabinet
of corporate CEOs with business acumen really don’t have the credibility to
claim statesmanship ambitions in the Middle East after making their real agenda
so transparent. Like bank robbers now
claiming to be priests, they needed to have been more convincing of their conversion
to higher callings by their actions.
His major strength is the military and economic power
we wield, and that, too, he has squandered. Looking at the horizon, he doesn’t need to return to
Congress for more Iraq $ until after Nov 2004. What he needs now is real improvement in the Hades that is
Israel and Palestine and to capture either of the two Most Wanted terrorists. You can easily bet what’s on his Santa
wish list. I applaud his verbal recognition to Islam’s values in
this speech, suspecting that it will cause him grief among Christian Zionists
who believe only one religion can be tied to democracy. - KWC As usual, bold highlights are mine. Link is live. Idealism
in the Face of a Troubled Reality By Robin Wright, Washington Post
Staff Writer, Friday, November 7, 2003; Page A01 In a speech that redefined the U.S. agenda in the Middle East,
President Bush waxed eloquent yesterday about his dream of democracy coexisting
with Islam and transforming an important geostrategic region that has defiantly
held out against the global tide of political change. But Bush failed to acknowledge the tough realities that are
likely to limit significant political progress in the near future: the United
States' all-consuming commitment to fighting a global war on terrorism and
confronting Islamic militancy. Washington still relies heavily on alliances
with autocratic governments to achieve these top priorities. The president's vision
was an attempt to wrap together major U.S. goals in the Islamic world -- new
governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace, as well as
political and economic openings in a wide swath of countries from North Africa
to South Asia -- under the wider rubric of promoting democracy. Bush pledged
new momentum to foster broad change comparable
to the end of communism in Eastern Europe. "The United
States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle
East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we
have shown before. And it will yield the same results," he vowed in a
speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. The speech was clearly
aimed at putting troubled Iraq into a more
acceptable context for a domestic audience alarmed by the mounting
attacks and the now daily troop deaths there. But for a foreign audience, the
president did send an important new signal
by criticizing decades of Western inaction in the Middle East. "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. And with the spread of
weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it
would be reckless to accept the status quo." In an unusual move,
the president even cited key allies, notably Egypt, that should foster greater
change. "He named names,
which he hasn't in the past, and it's vital to do that as the audience in the
region needs to know there's an address for his words, namely the Saudi royal
family and [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak," said Tom Malinowski,
Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. Bush basically "threw
down the gauntlet to Egypt," one of the two largest recipients
of U.S. aid and a stalwart ally, which is likely to infuriate Mubarak, said
Hisham Melhem, an Arab journalist and commentator. In a move that may gradually resonate in Muslim countries, Bush heralded
Islam as a force compatible with democracy. "It should be clear to all that Islam, the
faith of one-fifth of humanity, is consistent with democratic rule," Bush
said. "A religion that demands individual moral accountability and
encourages the encounter of the individual with God is fully compatible with
the rights and responsibilities of self-government." The words were
striking in the context of 25 years of tensions between the United States and
various Islamic movements. For half a century, U.S. policy has implicitly
accepted the concept of "Islamic
exceptionalism" -- that Islam and democracy are basically
incompatible and that Islam cannot be a vehicle for political reform. "Saying
the status quo is unacceptable is revolutionary," Melhem said. For Muslims, the U.S.
legacy on political systems in the Middle East has been most starkly defined by
the U.S. intervention in Iran to oust a nationalist movement to put the shah
back on the throne in 1953 and by the U.S. failure to act, or even condemn the
military, when Algerian generals aborted democratic elections in 1991. But as a result, Washington has a long-standing credibility problem -- and
the administration will need to take concrete steps to prove it intends to follow through in ways earlier
administrations did not. Bush's speech was short on specifics. "In the past,
every time a U.S. official has talked about democracy and responsible
government, people in the region have looked at them and said, 'You're running
against a 50-year legacy of doing the opposite.' We grew up understanding that
the United States would not tolerate real democracy as we'd end up with
governments or leaders or ideologies that were not compatible with the
West," Melhem added. Major
democratic change is also likely to prove elusive until the administration is
able to stabilize the region's flash points, which have led Washington to
perpetuate its reliance on governments willing to use repressive tactics to
crack down on either militants or anti-U.S. forces. "By and large,
administration after administration ultimately chooses national security
priorities over democracy and discovers more often than not that it's not a
trade-off," said Shibley Telhami, a Brookings Institution fellow who also
holds the Anwar Sadat chair in peace and development at the University of
Maryland. In a broad assessment
of the region, the president inflated
the progress toward democracy made by allies such as Saudi Arabia that are
harshly criticized for their abuses in the annual U.S. human rights report,
while he criticized countries such as Iran that have made some inroads but do not have good relations with Washington. "His portrayal of
what's going on in Arab countries is totally unrealistic," said Marina
Ottaway, co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. "The reality that he is overlooking is that in all these
countries that are supposedly making progress, hostility to the United States
is at an all-time high," she said. "So the idea that these are
countries where progress on democracy is going to make them better allies is
certainly not supported by what is going on." Keith wrote: One can't
help feeling intensely suspicious of the apparent change of heart |
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