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Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200403050842.asp
Maturity in the Middle East
(National Review) Victor Davis Hanson - Since September 11 we have witnessed a historic emergence of a comprehensive foreign policy to confront Islamic fundamentalism and its parasitic relationship with Middle East autocracy - without which it cannot survive. The Bush administration has advanced the most ambitious, humane, and needed initiatives for the Middle East in the last half century. We no longer give autocracies a pass for pumping oil and keeping out Communists. Instead, without naivete we strive for constitutional government and modernization. We are trying to help to integrate the Middle East into the rest of the world's democratic economy - and to end our own appeasement of fundamentalism, dictatorship, gender-apartheid, anti-Semitism, and press censorship. For the first time in a half-century, the Saudi royal family is more worried about American support for democratic change in the Middle East than we are of an oil embargo.