| PEOPLE |
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John Brady Kiesling |
"...our motives are much better than the Arab world
gives us credit for, but if we attempt to impose democracy on
Iraq or anywhere else, that democracy will last only as long
as we are committed to being there and holding it up."
John Brady
Kiesling, resigned political counsellor to US embassy in Greece,
NPR, March 7, 2003 |
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Salam Pax |
"...how could “support democracy in Iraq” become
to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end
up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody
minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people
have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful."
Salam Pax (the blogger
of baghdad) March 16, 2003 |
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James Woolsey |
" I think that what is current in a lot of discussion
about this is the notion, especially in Europe but to some extent
in this country: 'You crazy Americans, there you go being idealistic
again. Everybody knows that Arabs can't run democracies'...I
think there is only one word for that notion, and that word
is 'racist.'" James
Woolsey, AEI seminar March 25, 2003 |
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James Woolsey |
"... we are going to have to be involved for the next,
I think, several decades in helping change the face of the Middle
East. And the key alliance here, just as it was in the Cold
War, over and above our military power,the key alliance is going
to be with the moderate and sensible and reasonable Muslims
who constitute the vast major of the world's Muslims and their
understanding that we are on their side" James
Woolsey, AEI seminar March 25, 2003 |
| |
Richard Perle |
With respect to Egypt and other countries in the region, I
think we need to use... all of the instruments of influence
available to us in a measured way to move in the direction of
more representative government. I don't think that means
bringing every government down overnight, even if we were able
to do it, but I think it does mean a strategy, a sustained objective
to which we devote coherent resources. Richard
Perle, AEI seminar March 25, 2003 |
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| ISSUES |
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the big picture |
" While it's conceivable that bold American action could
democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative
could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That
all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy
hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush
plan with alarm." Joshua
Marshall, Washington Monthly, March 31, 2003 |
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the big picture |
But the concepts of individual liberty, representative democracy
and market economies will take hold within Middle Eastern nations,
just as they did in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Or at least
that is the unstated, long-term hope of the Bush administration.
Pete du Pont, Wall
Street Journal, October 16, 2002 (at www.likud.nl) |
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Robert D. Kaplan |
" Iraq has a one-man thugocracy, so the removal of Saddam
would threaten to disintegrate the entire ethnically riven country
if we weren't to act fast and pragmatically install people who
could actually govern. Therefore we should forswear any evangelical
lust to implement democracy overnight in a country with no tradition
of it... Our goal in Iraq should be a transitional secular dictatorship
that unites the merchant classes across sectarian lines and
may in time, after the rebuilding of institutions and the economy,
lead to a democratic alternative." Robert
D. Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly, November 2002 |
democracy
in the middle east