We have always pushed for reform in Eastasia

History being rewritten before my eyes! Fareed Zakaria has a piece called “What Bush Got Right” in Newsweek:

Bush never accepted the view that Islamic terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead he veered toward the analysis that the region was breeding terror because it had developed deep dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost total lack of political, economic and social modernization. The Arab world, in this analysis, was almost unique in that over the past three decades it had become increasingly unfree, even as the rest of the world was opening up. His solution, therefore, was to push for reform in these lands.

Really? I could have sworn that, in the weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration line was that the terrorists hated our freedoms. Any claims that maybe they were motivated by poverty or political oppression were dismissed by the right as overly-sympathetic talk of “root causes”.