Peter Dow's SCOTTISH NATIONAL STANDARD BEARER
political leadership forum.
Between 2003 and 2006. Peter Dow offered advice and education here that political leaders should be providing for the
Scottish nation. Email peterdow@talk21.com
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Secretary Rice's Paris Tour de Force. Vive la France! IP: 81.131.85.186 Posted on February 8, 2005 at 10:11:29 PM by Peter Dow
"Today's radical Islamists are swimming against the tide of the human spirit. They grab the headlines with their ruthless brutality, and they can be brutal. But they are dwelling on the outer fringes of a great world religion; and they are radicals of a special sort. They are in revolt against the future. The face of terrorism in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, called democracy "an evil principle."
To our enemies, Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite are also evil principles. They want to dominate others, not to liberate them. They demand conformity, not equality. They still regard difference as a license to kill.
But they are wrong. Human freedom will march ahead, and we must help smooth its way. We can do that by helping societies to find their own way to fulfill the promise of freedom."
"We know we have to deal with the world as it is. But, we do not have to accept the world as it is. Imagine where we would be today if the brave founders of French liberty or of American liberty had simply been content with the world as it was.
They knew that history does not just happen; it is made. History is made by men and women of conviction, of commitment and of courage, who will not let their dreams be denied."
"Let's talk about the Arab people. The Arab people deserve a better future than is currently in front of them. This is a part of the world in which the status quo is not going to be acceptable.
You have large populations that are not receiving proper education. As the report to the United Nations by Arab intellectuals noted, you have 22 countries that have a GDP that is not the size of Spain. This is just not acceptable for a culture -- the Arab cultures -- that were, in many ways, part of the cradle of civilization. How can this be?
And so the freedom deficit, the absence of freedom, has had very dramatic, negative effects in this part of the world. And unfortunately, we in the West, for too long, turned a blind eye to that freedom deficit.
When the President spoke at Whitehall in London, he talked about 60 years of trying to buy stability at the expense of freedom, and getting neither. And what we have gotten instead, is a level of hopelessness that has produced an ideology of hatred so virulent, so thorough, that people flew airplanes into American buildings on a fine September morning; blew up a train station in Madrid; people in another part of the world from another tradition, but the same ideology of hatred, that took helpless children hostage in Russia. This can't be the future of the Middle East.
And so both our security and our moral conscience tell us that this is a part of the world that can no longer be isolated from the prosperity and human dignity that freedom brings. And so it is not what President Bush defends; and certainly, I want to be very clear.
As I said earlier, this is not an issue of military power. This is an issue of the power of ideas, of the power of being able to support people in those societies who are just tired of being denied their freedom.
And so this is a great goal, not just for the United States, but for all of us who are fortunate enough to live on the right side of freedom because in each and every case, for all of us, somebody cared enough about human dignity and human liberty to make a stand in our past. Our ancestors did.
And that's why we all enjoy the liberty and freedom that we do. And sometime in the past, others stood up for us so that we could defeat tyranny and we could live in freedom. And we simply have to do the same thing for the people of the Middle East who are seeking a different future."
Peter Dow's SCOTTISH NATIONAL STANDARD BEARER
political leadership forum.
