they fully materialize. And fourth, advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.
The freedom agenda, as I called the fourth prong, was both idealistic and realistic. It was idealistic in that freedom is a universal gift from Almighty God. It was realistic because freedom is the most practical way to protect our country in the long run. As I said in my Second Inaugural Address, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”
The transformative power of freedom had been proven in places like South Korea, Germany, and Eastern Europe. For me, the most vivid example of freedom’s power was my relationship with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. Koizumi was one of the first world leaders to offer his support after 9/11. How ironic. Sixty years earlier, my father had fought the Japanese as a Navy pilot. Koizumi’s father had served in the government of Imperial Japan. Now their sons were working together to keep the peace. Something big had changed since World War II: By adopting a Japanese-style democracy, an enemy had become an ally.
In addition to helping spread democracy, Junichiro Koizumi was a huge Elvis fan and visited Graceland.
Announcing the freedom agenda was one step. Implementing it was another. In some places, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we had a unique responsibility to give the people we liberated a chance to build free societies. But these examples were the exception, not the rule. I made clear that the freedom agenda was “not primarily the task of arms.” We would advance freedom by supporting fledgling democratic governments in places like the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine. We would encourage dissidents and democratic reformers suffering under repressive regimes in Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela. And we would advocate for freedom while maintaining strategic relationships with nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and China.
Critics charged that the freedom agenda was a way for America to impose our values on others. But freedom is not an American value; it is a universal value. Freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen. And when people are given the choice, they choose freedom. At the end of World War II, there were about two dozen democracies in the world. When I took office in January 2001, there were 120.
Shortly after the 2004 election, I read
In one memorable passage, Sharansky describes a fellow Soviet dissident who likened a tyrannical state to a soldier who constantly points a gun at a prisoner. Eventually, his arms tire and the prisoner escapes. I considered it America’s responsibility to put pressure on the arms of the world’s tyrants. Making that goal a central part of our foreign policy was one of my most consequential decisions as president.
The great tide of freedom that swept much of the world during the second half of the twentieth century had largely bypassed one region: the Middle East.
The UN’s Arab Human Development Report, released in 2002, revealed the bleak state of the region: One in three people was illiterate. Unemployment averaged 15 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population had access to the Internet. Maternal mortality rates rivaled those of the least developed countries in the world. Economic output per capita was minuscule.
The authors of the UN report, a group of respected Arab scholars, attributed the depressing results to three deficits: a deficit in knowledge, a deficit in women’s empowerment, and, most important, a deficit in freedom.
For most of the Cold War, America’s priority in the Middle East was stability. Our alliances were based on anticommunism, a strategy that made sense at the time. But under the surface, resentment and anger built. Many people turned to radical clerics and mosques as a release. Amid these conditions, terrorists found fertile recruiting ground. Then nineteen terrorists born in the Middle East turned up on planes in the United States. After 9/11, I decided that the stability we had been promoting was a mirage. The focus of the freedom agenda would be the Middle East.
Six months before I took office, the Camp David peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians fell apart. President Clinton had worked tirelessly to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak made a generous offer to turn over most of the West Bank and Gaza, two territories with majority Palestinian populations that were occupied by Israeli forces and dotted with Israeli settlements. Arafat turned him down.
Two months later, in September 2000, frustration over the failed peace accord—along with prominent Israeli leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—led to the Second Intifada. Palestinian extremists, many affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, launched a wave of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in Israel.
I didn’t blame President Clinton for the failure at Camp David or the violence that followed. I blamed Arafat. America, Europe, and the United Nations had flooded the Palestinian Territories with development aid. A good portion of it was diverted to Arafat’s bank account. He made the
The Israeli people responded to the violent onslaught the way any democracy would: They elected a leader who promised to protect them, Ariel Sharon. I first met Sharon in 1998, when Laura and I went to Israel with three fellow governors* on a trip sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
The visit was my first to the Holy Land. The most striking memory of the trip came when Ariel Sharon, then a minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, gave us a helicopter tour of the country. Sharon was a bull of a man, a seventy-year-old former tank commander who had served in all of Israel’s wars. Shortly after the chopper lifted off, he pointed to a patch of ground below. “I fought there,” he said with pride in his gruff voice. When the helicopter turned toward the West Bank, he gestured at an isolated cluster of homes. “I built that settlement,” he said. Sharon subscribed to the Greater Israel policy, which rejected territorial concessions. He knew every inch of the land, and it didn’t sound like he intended to give any of it back.
“Here our country was only nine miles wide,” Sharon said at another point, referring to the distance between the 1967 borders and the sea. “We have driveways longer than that in Texas,” I later joked. I was struck by Israel’s vulnerability in a hostile neighborhood. Ever since President Harry Truman defied his secretary of state by recognizing Israel in 1948, America had been the Jewish state’s best friend. I came away convinced that we had a responsibility to keep the relationship strong.
A little over two years later, I called Ariel Sharon from the Oval Office to congratulate him on his election as prime minister. “Maybe, after so many years and wars in which I have participated,” he said, “we will have peace in the region.”
On June 1, 2001, a suicide bomber killed twenty-one Israelis at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv. Other attacks struck Israeli buses, train stations, and shopping malls. Israeli Defense Forces targeted operations at Hamas strongholds, but innocent Palestinians—including five boys walking to school one day—were killed during the operations.
I was appalled by the violence and loss of life on both sides. But I refused to accept the moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide attacks on innocent civilians and Israeli military actions intended to protect their people. My views came into sharper focus after 9/11. If the United States had the right to defend itself and prevent future attacks, other democracies had those rights, too.
I spoke to Yasser Arafat three times in my first year as president. He was courteous, and I was polite in return. But I made clear we expected him to crack down on extremism. “I know these are difficult issues for you and your people,” I told him in February 2001, “but the best way to settle this and start resolving the situation is to stop the violence in the region.”
In January 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted a ship called the
