Friday, October 14, 2005
Putting dictators on the spot
There is a chance that history will regard Condoleezza Rice as our greatest Secretary of State. What diplomat of any great power anywhere has actually grabbed a dictator and forced him to respond to the press? And this is what Condi said when Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev dodged a very pointed question from an American reporter:
This has not always been true, of course, but it has been painfully clear since Secretary Rice's speech in Cairo. According to today's American policy, none of stability in politics, security in the delivery of natural resources, and support in the war on Islamic jihadism are more important than the advance of freedom and the development of representative government. If this policy can sustain itself through this administration and the next without being hijacked in the service of "distributive justice" or other perversions of classical liberalism, the world will be a much better place for it.
Via Instapundit.
SECRETARY RICE: Andrea, I think if we were interested only in oil and the war on terrorism we would not be speaking in the way that we are about democracy here or in Saudi Arabia or throughout the Middle East.
And so quite clearly, while we do have interests in terms of resources and in terms of the struggle for terrorism, we have in no way allowed those interests to get in the way of our open and clear defense of freedom.
This has not always been true, of course, but it has been painfully clear since Secretary Rice's speech in Cairo. According to today's American policy, none of stability in politics, security in the delivery of natural resources, and support in the war on Islamic jihadism are more important than the advance of freedom and the development of representative government. If this policy can sustain itself through this administration and the next without being hijacked in the service of "distributive justice" or other perversions of classical liberalism, the world will be a much better place for it.
Via Instapundit.
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