US Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Monday that the emergence of an Islamist government in Iraq would "not be in the best interest of the Iraqi people or its neighbors."
| He said, putting it mildly... |
"We believe that an Iraqi government should be created that is representative of the Iraqi people and of all the differents elements of the Iraqi people," Powell said after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "I think it would be unfortunate if a government rose there that is so fundamentalist that it didn't respect the basic things for democracy," Powell told reporters here. "What we are trying to do is to make sure that we develop leaders to come up and represent all elements of the population." Powell has been on a tour of the region to revive the Arab-Israeli peace process following the US-led war in Iraq in March and April that ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Both Powell and Rumsfeld are now on record as saying they're against a fundo government. I hope the people running things realize that to build a real democracy it will have to be a libertarian democracy — Friedman was writing about that about a week ago:The challenge for the U.S. will be to build such a foundation of liberty in a country with virtually no legacy of it at all. Under ideal conditions that will take years — and it is not clear the Bush team is ready to invest that degree of time, money and people. Not only will it take years, but it'll have to be done over the screams of anguish of the committed Islamists who're trying to swarm the country and take it away from us. To fight them, it will be necessary to regard them as little different from the terrorists who fight in their name. I'm not sure we're vicious enough to do that yet; maybe after the next high death toll strike within the USA, but not yet. Until we make the commitment to true religious liberty, along with all the other items in our Bill of Rights, we're not going to build a real society anywhere in the Middle East or Central or South Asia. The reason we have a guarantee of religious freedom is so we don't become a society like the ones we're fighting. |
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