.
"
Democracy is more than a single election, or even a succession of them....A broad and energetic promotion of democracy may produce
not peace and stability, but revolution," Hyde said back
in 2006." The last Christian church has recently been
razed in Afghanistan and many of Iraq's Christians have been forced to flee. We expedited genocide, not democracy.
10/26/11,"
Hyde Was Right, Bush Was Wrong," CNS News, Terence P. Jeffrey
"
Events unfolding in the Middle East are proving that Henry Hyde was right and George Bush was wrong
on the wisdom of a foreign policy focused on promoting democracy.When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before Hyde's House International Relations Committee on Feb. 16, 2006, she presented written testimony touting Bush's messianic policy.
"In his second inaugural address, President Bush laid out the vision that leads America into the world: 'It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,'" said Rice.
She pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan as evidence that Bush's policy had sewn the seeds that would make freedom blossom across the Middle East....
"The people of Iraq and Afghanistan," she concluded, "are helping to lead the transformation of the Broader Middle East from despotism to democracy."
Hyde, who chaired the committee, calmly poured cold water on this.
"It is a truism that power breeds arrogance," he said. "A far greater danger, however, stems from the self-delusion that is the more certain companion."
"To illustrate my point," Hyde said, "let me focus on a school of thought that has gained increasing prominence in our national debate - namely, the assertion that our interests are best advanced by assigning a central place in the foreign policy of our nation to the
- worldwide promotion of democracy. I call this the Golden Theory."...
It was wrong, Hyde said, to liken efforts to implant democracy today in problematic regions of the globe with what happened in Europe and parts of East Asia after World War II.
Even in Europe, he said, the U.S. needed to invest "enormous resources toward enforcing order, removing barriers, reviving economies and a host of other unprecedented innovations.
"The resulting transformation is usually ascribed to the workings of democracy," he said, "but it is
- due far more to the impact of the long-term U.S. presence."
In East Asia, too, Hyde said, "stable democratic" governments were rare where the U.S. did not have an extended presence.
Hyde argued that those who thought democracy could be grafted onto any nation on earth did not understand how deep the roots of representative government must run in a culture.
"But democracy is more than a single election, or even a succession of them," he said. "It is a way of life for a nation, embracing its life and institutions, and all of their complexity, and embraced in turn by its people and their actions, thoughts and beliefs.
"Viewed in its more compete historical context," Hyde said, "implanting democracy in large areas would require that we possess an unbounded power and undertake an open-ended
- commitment of time and resources, which we cannot and will not do."
In his second inaugural address, Bush had argued that his policy of promoting democracy was rooted in America's religious understanding of the nature of man.
"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," Bush said. "From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value,
- because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth."
This principle - articulated in our Declaration of Independence and based on an understanding of God and man that traces back to both classical philosophy and the Bible - is undoubtedly true. But the
- dominant cultural forces
- in the very lands Bush tried to fashion into democracies
- deny it.
Four years after Hyde rebutted the Golden Theory,
the last Christian church was razed in Condoleezza Rice's Afghan democracy. The State Department last month published a report on religious freedom there that said
- "two men were in detention for conversion to Christianity."
In Iraq, according to State, the Christian population has been cut at least in half since 2003 - and is now no more than 600,000. Christians are fleeing a country where the government has failed to protect them from
- sectarian acts of persecution and murder.
The State Department also reports that in Iraq's democracy it is a crime "subject to punishment by death" to express "moral support" for "Zionist organizations."
Last month, Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Ra'i of Lebanon warned that Syria might be headed for sectarian war.
- "This, then, is a genocide and not democracy and reform," he said.
In Cairo two weeks ago, the Egyptian military killed about two dozen unarmed Coptic Christians participating
- in a demonstration to protest the destruction of a Christian church.
"We must also be cognizant of the fact that a broad and energetic promotion of democracy may produce
- not peace and stability, but revolution," Hyde said back in 2006.
"History teaches that revolutions are very dangerous things, more often destructive than benign and uncontrollable by their very nature," he said. "Upending established order based on theory is
-----------------------
"Before the change of regime seven years ago, we didn't have massacres like this," said Bishop Metti Metok."...
11/7/2010, "
Lives of fear for Iraqi Christians," BBC
"
More than 40 Christians are believed
to have died when security forces stormed the cathedral building where they were being
held hostage by gunmen who detonated their explosive belts, causing carnage.
Fadya Issa is about to leave the country with her husband, their two young sons and her sister-in-law Samira,
It is not a spur-of-the-moment decision driven by the church attack, though it has made her glad they are going.
It took them two years of waiting to get their American visas....
Between them they have about four words of English.
"Of course, it's sad to leave your homeland, the place you were born and grew up, and all the things you know," said Fadya.
"But what can we do? Here, you're afraid all the time. You're afraid at home, and when you take the kids to school, and when you go to the market. Wherever you go, you're afraid."...
Since 2003 Iraq's Christians, who have lived here for nearly 2,000 years, have dwindled in numbers from an estimated 900,000 to about half that number, though there are no statistics.
"Before the change of regime seven years ago, we didn't have massacres like this," said Bishop Metti Metok."...
------------------------
"
Grotesque levels of corruption and mismanagement."8/31/10, "
Assessing America's 'imperial adventure' in Iraq," BBC
"
And because the Green Zone administration was thrown together in a huge hurry back in 2002-03, overseen by former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - a man with no interest in nation-building - some of what was done involved
grotesque levels of corruption and mismanagement. Mr Rumsfeld was sent a careful,
conscientious 900-page report by the state department containing detailed plans for the post-invasion period. He reportedly dumped it, unopened,
straight into his waste-paper basket. Iraqis, and some Americans, pile a good deal of the blame for what happened during this period on to Mr Rumsfeld's ally Paul Bremer, the temperamental pro-consul who often
- seemed unaware of what was going on right under his nose.
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, when asked by the Saudi foreign minister why the US insisted on
- going ahead with the invasion, answered: "Because it's do-able."
But the problem began even higher up.
A respected Iraqi dissident, who later became vice-president, has described how shocked he was to find, a few weeks before the invasion, that President Bush seemed wholly unaware
- that Muslims in Iraq were divided between Shia and Sunni Islam....
Unthinkably large amounts of money have been spent here, and yet Iraq has slipped far down the world's rich list.
Has the United States benefited? It is hard to see how.
As the British learned in the Boer War, and Russia learned by invading Afghanistan, great military powers run big risks by putting their strength to the test against weak-seeming opponents.
America seems to have shrunk as a direct result of its imperial adventure in Iraq."...
.
