RIGHT AND NECESSARY:

Condi Rice: The Bush 'Freedom Agenda' Won: As the war in Iraq ends and Gaddafi falls, this week's Newsweek, to be published tomorrow, has an exclusive look at former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's new memoir, 'No Higher Honor.' Rice takes us inside the Bush administration--and inside her head--during some of the world's tensest moments. (The Daily Beast, October 23, 2011)

Asked about the cost of the war, she tells Christopher Dickey, "I don't think you put a price on a Middle East that will look very different without Saddam Hussein and with movement toward freedom."

"Revolutions are not pretty," Rice says of the changes sweeping the region now and the often brutal forms they take, such as Gaddafi's gory end. "If political reform comes late, when there is a lot of anger, then it is not going to be either smooth, or, frankly, look like we would like it to look."

Despite this, Rice predicts a better ending to the Middle East revolutions and credits Bush's Freedom Agenda with facilitating it. "We pursued the Freedom Agenda not only because it was right but also because it was necessary," she writes. "There is both a moral case and a practical one for the proposition that no man, woman or child should live in tyranny. Those who excoriate the approach as idealistic or unrealistic missed the point. In the long run, it is authoritarianism that is unstable and unrealistic."

Posted by oj at October 23, 2011 3:54 PM
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