A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.
Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.
My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it.
I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.
When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around.
I believe the democratic transformation in Iraq will lead to change in Middle East.
Children in a third world country. That's how we spread democracy.
We have to have a more realistic foreign policy and not a utopian one where we say, oh, we're going to spread freedom and democracy, and everybody in the Middle East is going to love us. They are not going to love us.