I think this is what Bush has been saying since Sept 02. This from that Boston Globe editorial you posted:
It will not be easy to persuade the victims of Washington's erstwhile clients that Bush now means it when he proclaims that "liberty is the direction of history." Saudis know about America's special relationship with the princes who treat the country and its oil reserves as their private property.
US is pretty well out of Saudi now. Something's going on there but how that's going to fall out isn't at all clear.
Iraqi Shi'ites remember that Bush's father, after calling for their popular uprising in the spring of 1991, allowed Saddam to crush them with his helicopter gunships, tanks, and heavy artillery, slaughtering perhaps 200,000 people, whose bodies are now being found in mass graves.
It's a good thing he's not his father. The US is there now. (It's pretty clear, I think, his Dad made the mistake of thinking the Gulf War defeat would bring Hussein down. They just kept getting that wrong).
It is precisely because Washington has collaborated for so long with the crooked dictators and presidents for life in the Arab world that the common people are prone to believe the nastiest tales about Americans spread by propagandists and conspiracy peddlers.
Yes. That speech to the UN Sept 02 must really have jolted them. "No... say it ain't so." But it seems to be so.
If Bush's gaudy oratory about the blessings of liberty is to have any chance of being taken seriously beyond these shores, he will have to prove to skeptical peoples in the Gulf region, the Mideast, and North Africa that the United States has truly embarked on a "new policy." That would mean genuinely helping Iraqis shape a new democratic state with minority rights and the rule of law; firmly shepherding Israel and the Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence; and siding not with America's old client regimes but with the populations those regimes have robbed and repressed
Yup. I think the US is pulling away from the dictators. Iraq means turning up every day and doing the work. Bush, anyway, seems to be good at that.
Palestine/Israel. Being hard about the PA's lousy "government" is not a bad thing but as long as it's so bad it's difficult to know what to do with Israelis.
Gotta go |
