(Washington, D.C., February 22, 2011). Today, Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, and a former U.S. Senate candidate in Florida, issued the following statement on events in the Middle East and around the world:
“In the months after the Iraq war began, when the administration of President George W. Bush failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as it has predicted, the government had to come up with another ‘reason’ to justify the invasion. Instead, the President then declared that the primary rationale for the war was to lay the seed of democracy in the Middle East — so called “nation building,” which of course W. has denounced as a foreign policy during the run up to the 2000 presidential elections. In recent weeks, with the fall of the heads of state in Egypt and Tunisia and the rise of so called freedom movements in Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain, Bush sycophants and cronies have boasted that W.’s Iraq war was the primary trigger — suggesting that events are “for the best.”
It is clear however, in retrospect, that Bush’s Iraq war did not unleash the forces of so called democracy in Arab countries — particularly since there is no real democracy in Iraq even now — but instead the severe state of their economies. When the large majority of the population is unemployed and cannot even provide for themselves or their families, people take to the streets. In the words of the famous song written by Kris Kristofferson and sung by Janis Joplin, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Thus, Bush’s and the Democrat Congress’s own neglect of Wall Street, the housing and real estate markets, and financial centers — all of which collapsed under a mountain of corruption in 2008, leading to a worldwide near depression — created the after-shock that what is primarily responsible for bringing the masses to revolt. And, this revolt is not limited to the Arab world, as Americans are experiencing in Wisconsin and other venues around the United States. Revolution is on the horizon in western countries as well, as civil disobedience in Europe, as in Britain, has also signaled.
The bottom line is that governments around the world have failed to represent the interests of their people, and the extreme events in the Middle East are a stark reminder that even Arab countries, with no history of democracy and living under autocratic dictatorial regimes, will rise up, as “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
But the tragedy is that these Arab states are not likely to implement true democracies, but instead have newly installed governments taken over, as occurred in Iran over 30 years ago, with radical muslim terrorist related interests, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Bush’s so called legacy of democracy is thus faux.
As for the United States and other western countries, their governments are in jeopardy of falling, first at the ballot box and then potentially by other means, if the economy does not significantly improve in the near term.
For an interview with Mr. Klayman, contact leklayman@yahoo.com.