Reply #8: Wrong title, doesn't even match most of the article - delusions of Bush

[54anickel]

snip>

Others still see that as a romantic illusion hardly grounded in the reality of the region, a view voiced most prominently last week by Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser for Bush's father. Larry Diamond, who served as a senior adviser for Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq last year, said in an interview that by insisting on holding elections in Iraq this month Bush would "grease the slide to civil war."

"He's a very stubborn man," Diamond said, "and there's a fine line between Churchillian resolve and self-defeating obstinacy, and I think he's going over the line on this."

Bush, who keeps a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office and identifies with the wartime British prime minister, has made democracy in the Middle East a signature goal for his administration, rhetorically at least. In November 2003, echoing the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, he called for a "forward strategy of freedom" that would involve a decades-long effort to promote pluralism in Arab nations. Privately Bush has expressed the belief that success at such an endeavor would be the achievement he would be most remembered for in 50 years.

snip>

The elections in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, may underscore "the reality that democracy can easily create as many problems as it solves." .... :eyes: Which is why it is no longer allowed here in the US

The article goes on seeming to say Bush is taking credit, or hopes to get credit (depending on how you read it) for other elections as well, such as Palestine and Ukraine.