From ALJAZEERA:
While many American conservatives were quicker to warm to the recent Arab revolutions than the Obama administration, they were wrong to have always assumed that American power was the essential ingredient for change in the region…
For Charles Krauthammer, a popular conservative columnist and one of the chief theorists of democracy promotion, the current upheavals have been all about Bush. “Everyone,” Krauthammer insisted on March 4, “is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda” now.
If this is true, then it behooves us to ask what Krauthammer defines as the ‘freedom agenda’. It turns out that, according to Krauthammer (all that talk about ‘regime change’ from 2002 to 2003 notwithstanding), the chief principle of the ‘freedom agenda’ can be reduced á la Abrams to the rather pedestrian insight that “Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom”.
But Krauthammer does not stop there and advances quickly from the banal to the absurd. Apparently, in Krauthammer’s words, “the Bush Doctrine set the premise” for the current revolutions, upsetting age old structures of power in the Arab world. Really? Did the Arab public truly require Bush’s imprimatur on democracy before they rose up to demand greater justice and freedom with the tools provided by democratic discourses?
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