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Clark on why we screwed up.
Quote:
Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
You know I like the guy cept for his baby killing tendencies, but "Democracy and freedom have been ascendant in most parts of the world for at least the last 15 years, and it's hard to imagine that they aren't also destined to take root in the Middle East"?
This makes me want to vomit. This number was picked out of thin air so people could think "and a Democrat was president for 8 -- the majority-- of those years!".
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I think you're reading him wrong. He was referring to the fact that the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He praises Reagan instead of criticizing him, but he says the neo-cons are drawing the wrong lessons from Reagan's successes:
- As an Army officer in and out of Washington, I met many who would later star in the neoconservative movement at conferences and briefings. They're rightly proud of serving under Ronald Reagan, as I am.
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So, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," or stood before crowds in Berlin and proclaimed "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," he was reaching a receptive audience on the other side of the wall. The neoconservatives persist in seeing a vast difference between Reagan's policy of confronting the Soviets and previous American administrations' tack of containing it. In fact, it was precisely those decades of containment and cultural engagement that made Reagan's challenge effective.
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But if the events of the last year tell us anything, it is that democracy in the Middle East is unlikely to come at the point of our gun. And Ronald Reagan would have known better than to try.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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