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Virginia Representative Jim Moran is no stranger to controversy. And he now finds himself in midst of another one--over what he said about Jews, Iraq, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an interview in the September-October issue of Tikkun magazine.
Many American commentators tend to identify Middle East democracy promotion as unwise, arguing that the Bush administration should have patiently promoted the growth of institutions, civil society, and the rule of law, instead of insisting on elections in Arab countries. This new canon seems reasonable but has three crucial flaws.
I salute the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and congratulate it on this important occasion, taking note of the significant contribution that NED has made to democracy worldwide. I would like to highlight what I believe are some of the main advances and achievements of democracy assistance over the past quarter-century and also to examine the challenging road ahead.
In June, a proposed immigration reform bill collapsed in the Senate. Before the critical vote, activist groups arguing that increased immigration damages the economy launched campaigns targeting senators sitting on the fence. The strategy worked, and many of the senators who supported immigration reform but ended up voting against the bill are up for re-election in 2008.
This year marks an important anniversary. In 1807, the Russian Empire and the young American Republic agreed to establish diplomatic relations. Soon after, Russia's first envoy, Alexander Dashkov, arrived in Washington, and John Quincy Adams traveled to St. Petersburg. Since this modest beginning, our relations, at their best and worst, have borne out de Tocqueville's prophecy that America and Russia are "marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe." Today, with the Cold War and immediate post-Soviet transition behind us, we face a new world in which an effective U.S.-Russian relationship is central to addressing many global challenges.
The Carnegie Endowment — the only U.S. think tank to oppose the war in Iraq before the invasion — offers a large body of up-to-date work on this critical issue.
America's standing as a global symbol of democracy and human rights has been crippled by the many U.S. abuses of the rule of law in the war on terrorism. The glaring gap between the president's sweeping rhetoric about a freedom agenda and his administration's many efforts to secure economic and security favors from autocratic allies around the world multiplies the cynicism and confusion.
In the opening years of this century, the world was presented with a historic confrontation between the Western world and the Islamic and Arab world. In this context, Washington's policies--and its attempts to counter the backlash from these policies--have increasingly pushed Arabs away.
With former Senator Fred Thompson's entry into the presidential race, the Republicans now have at least three candidates who could have the money and votes to compete, if necessary, all the way to June 2008. And they might have to do so. Indeed, when the Republicans meet in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September 2008 to choose their nominee, they might be looking at a brokered convention.
The Iraq war’s monopoly on America’s political energy has now stretched to five years. During what is an eon in a time of fast-moving global change, a number of international security problems have grown into full-blown crises. Unless a major effort is made to reverse current trends, the fissures now spreading across the global nonproliferation regime could easily become the worst of these crises.
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