Word: arabism
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...Iraq from Kuwait. But Cheney never strayed far from the official line coming out of the White House. He asked early on after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait whether the U.S. should consider overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but abandoned the idea quickly. It fell to Cheney to secure support from Arab leaders for pushing Saddam out of Kuwait, support gained with the promise that the U.S. had no intention of marching to Baghdad. Like the other principal players in that war, Cheney has steadfastly defended the decision ever since...
...that day underscored how some nations had resisted the seductive call of peace, democracy and freedom--and that we had paid for the resistance. The Administration, says Mandelbaum, "has decided that the cause of Sept. 11 lies in the failure of our ideals to take root in the Arab world...
That failure is stunning. The Arab lands lie at the heart of an arc of crisis from Marrakech to Bangladesh. Autocracies, often dynastic, remain the principal form of government; economies are stagnant; violence is a common way of resolving political debate. Last summer the U.N. Development Programme commissioned a panel of regional experts to write an Arab Human Development Report. It was perhaps the most important volume published in 2002. "The wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s...
What the report did not say--though it should have--was that others were now being hurt, killed, as a consequence of the Arab world's self-inflicted wounds. It would, after all, have been possible to write a similarly gloomy tome on Central Africa. The Arab world's failure is noteworthy not because of its scale, but because on Sept. 11 it spilled out of its natural confines and into metropolitan America. With no legitimate channels for political discourse, Arabs have suffered from what Queen Rania of Jordan calls a "hope gap." For some, that gap has been filled...
...then there's Israel. Plenty of Arab commentators make frankly ridiculous attempts to blame their region's woes on the Jewish state. Even the otherwise sensible authors of the Arab Human Development Report claim that "Israel's illegal occupation of Arab lands is one of the most pervasive obstacles to security and progress in the region," as if the failure of any sizable Arab nation to build a successful, diversified economy could be laid at the door of the Knesset. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration has not done all that it could to show that its approach to the Israel-Palestine...