We have always pushed for reform in Eastasia

[avram]

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”.

Comments

[jcb.livejournal.com]

the terrorists hate our freedoms - this category includes the baathists, the taliban, etc. - the average joe's don't. to say that the root cause of the hatred of freedom was social or cultural or economic would imply that the average arab doesn't want to be liberated, which he never maintained - which he maintained the liberals were maintaining with their talk of "root causes." whether you think he's right or not is one thing but he WAS consistent.