Decision Points

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
The Case for Democracy
by Natan Sharansky , a dissident who spent nine years in the Soviet gulags. In the book Sharansky describes how he and his fellow prisoners were inspired by hearing leaders like Ronald Reagan speak with moral clarity and call for their freedom.
    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
Forbes
list of the world’s wealthiest “kings, queens, and despots.” Yet his people remained trapped in poverty, hopelessness, and extremism. For a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, he sure didn’t seem very interested in peace.
    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