Posted on 05/10/2006 4:42:21 PM PDT by kellynla
DURING HIS first four years in office, President Bush made impressive strides toward achieving the improbable goal laid out in his second inaugural address — "ending tyranny in our world." American troops liberated 50 million people and midwived representative governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States also provided important support to peaceful uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan.
The ripples of those revolutions reverberated throughout the greater Middle East, long the major breeding ground of anti-Western terrorism. At a minimum, tyrants felt compelled to pay lip service to American demands that they curtail support for terrorism and show greater respect for human rights. Syria's Bashar Assad pulled his occupation army out of Lebanon; Hosni Mubarak promised to hold genuine electoral contests in Egypt; the Saudi royal family deigned to hold elections for municipal councils.
In the last year, however, the global momentum for democratization has palpably slowed and in some places reversed course altogether. Vladimir V. Putin has crushed all competing centers of power in Russia. Belarus, the only other dictatorship left in Europe, held fraudulent elections that confirmed Alexander G. Lukashenko's death grip on power. The same thing happened in Kazakhstan, where president-for-life Nursultan A. Nazarbayev claimed to have won more than 90% of the vote. Next door in Uzbekistan, security forces gunned down hundreds of unarmed protesters in the city of Andijan and then tried to cover up the massacre.
The same worrisome trend is observable in the Middle East. The Iranian ayatollahs have stepped up their campaign of torturing, jailing and executing dissidents. The Assad regime has arrested more opposition figures at home and continues to intimidate anti-Syrian activists in Lebanon. And, most glaring of all, modern-day pharaoh Mubarak has imprisoned his leading liberal opponent and renewed the draconian "emergency law"...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Right, let's start the draft, gas rationing, and selling War Bonds. We got to fight the world.
Amazing. Why would anyone want to be President of the USA? First he is doing too much, he is pissing off the world blah blah blah blah blah. NOW he is NOT doing enough!!!!!!
I did take the time to read the article and the guy is wrong.
This was his most accurate comment:
"Entrenched elites have an obvious incentive to resist giving up power, and they now feel free to do so because they think that Bush, a lame-duck president with approval ratings in the low 30s, is too feeble to resist."
That's their (entrenched elites) mistake.
However, Boot goes on to say we shouldn't support Aliev and Mubarak because their records are suspect. Perhaps if the world was just, he'd be right. But those two men are leaders of countries that are strategically important to us, especially in today's climate. A better strategy would be to make sure we continue to have good contacts and relations with people in those countries, while privately and diplomatically influencing them to loosen the reigns a bit.
Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.
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