"Iraqi democracy will succeed," President George W. Bush declared in November 2003, "and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation." The audience at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington answered with hearty applause. Bush went on: "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/25/rebirth-of-a-nation.html
Looks like he was right. Iraq is becoming a functioning democracy, and citizens of other nations in the region covet those same freedoms enough to rise up.
Some more prewar comments:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.bush07nov07,0,5347312.story
WASHINGTON -- President Bush laid out a broad vision Thursday of an American mission to spread democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, saying, "Freedom can be the future of every nation."
Engendering democracy across the Middle East "must be a focus of American policy for decades to come," the president said in a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded foundation that promotes reform abroad.
He offered no new program for promoting democracy nor any specifics for how the United States will encourage what he called the "global democratic revolution."
However, the speech was his most detailed and far-reaching explanation of a theme he first sounded in the run-up to the war in Iraq. "The freedom we prize is not for us alone," he said, "it is the right and the capacity of all mankind."
The United States has long supported authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, partly because of the nation's need for oil from the region. Several countries in the region were also seen as allies in the superpower competition with the Soviet Union.
Bush took the uncharacteristic step of implicitly criticizing his predecessors, saying that previous policies were shortsighted.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," the president said.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/25/rebirth-of-a-nation.html
Looks like he was right. Iraq is becoming a functioning democracy, and citizens of other nations in the region covet those same freedoms enough to rise up.
Some more prewar comments:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.bush07nov07,0,5347312.story
WASHINGTON -- President Bush laid out a broad vision Thursday of an American mission to spread democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, saying, "Freedom can be the future of every nation."
Engendering democracy across the Middle East "must be a focus of American policy for decades to come," the president said in a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded foundation that promotes reform abroad.
He offered no new program for promoting democracy nor any specifics for how the United States will encourage what he called the "global democratic revolution."
However, the speech was his most detailed and far-reaching explanation of a theme he first sounded in the run-up to the war in Iraq. "The freedom we prize is not for us alone," he said, "it is the right and the capacity of all mankind."
The United States has long supported authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, partly because of the nation's need for oil from the region. Several countries in the region were also seen as allies in the superpower competition with the Soviet Union.
Bush took the uncharacteristic step of implicitly criticizing his predecessors, saying that previous policies were shortsighted.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," the president said.
