Transcript and RealAudio broadcast are available.
Excerpts:
"Even the Egyptians, there is a growing grassroots movement against President Mubarak running unopposed for a fifth term. And that's why after the Iraqi elections and the Palestinian elections all of us said it's going to be interesting to watch President Assad in Syria, President Ben Ali in Tunisia, President Mubarak in Egypt run unopposed in sham elections and receiving the support, reportedly -- supposedly of more than 95 percent of their own people. It is going to be extremely difficult for these Arab rulers to conduct business as usual after the Palestinian elections, the Iraqi elections taking place in Lebanon." Hisham Melhem.
"I think that some of the advocates of promoting democracy who are on the ...fringes of the Bush administration sometimes deal with this as though you sort of take two Thomas Jefferson aspirins at night and wake up a democrat. It doesn't work like that."
"We need to come to grips in the United States with the fact that this is a very complicated process. Moreover, many of the beneficiaries of democratization are going to be Islamic groups. We see this in ...Lebanon where Hezbollah, the party of God is the best organized political party in the country; representing arguably half a million, three quarters of a million people if not more than that."
"So we need to come to grips with the fact that in many of these cases we're going to see parties coming to power that are not secular liberals, they're not the parties comprised of people that we like to invite to Washington, DC." A. R. Norton
No comments:
Post a Comment