Gary Rosenblatt has a report on the Herzliya Conference on National Strength and Security in Israel, which he attended along with "1,200 Israeli political, military, business and academic leaders and several hundred guests from the diaspora:"
Israel is a Red State.
Many of the presenters at Herzliya spoke optimistically about prospects for peace in the Mideast, citing the re-election of George W. Bush as even more significant than the death of Yasir Arafat.
Natan Sharansky, the minister for the diaspora and author of a new book that has become a Bush favorite — entitled "The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" — told me excitedly about his private meeting with the president at the White House several weeks ago. He said Bush told him that his book laid out systematically what the president felt instinctively: that peace can only come to the Mideast through a democratization process in the Arab world, not the other way around. . . Sharansky added that Bush is making the new book required reading for top officials, and told him he even bought a copy "on his own nickel" for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Similarly, Finance Minster Benjamin Netanyahu spent most of his talk at the conference . . . emphasizing that the Bush Doctrine (insisting on democracy in the Mideast) is the antidote to the failed Oslo peace plan. Its goal of replacing tyrannies with democracies is "an incredible objective," Netanyahu said, and though it will take years, Bush "understands it perfectly."
Such praise for Bush and his vision of the Mideast was common throughout the conference.
Netanyahu’s speech is a detailed look at both Israel’s foreign and economic policy, worth perusing:
Bush Jr., as opposed to Bush Sr., does not defeat the Iraqi army and then leave, nor does he simply replace the tyrant with another one. Rather, he replaces the tyrant with a new regime. Bush Jr. defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan, and while withdrawing introduced a new system of government.
The idea is to replace tyranny with democracy . . . a lengthy process. President Bush understands this perfectly. It is a long process that took quite a few years in Germany and in Japan, and it will take even longer here, yet it is the very same process. . . . We all remember Bush’s famous speech in June 2002, in which he spoke about two neighboring states, coexisting. This wasn’t new — what was new this time was that he spoke about a democratic Palestinian state.
The blogging-before-breakfast Yael pointed me to a review of Sharansky’s book by Bruce Thornton today in Victor Davis Hanson’s "Private Papers." It’s a perceptive review, noting some of the reasons why democratization will be more difficult in the Middle East than it was in Germany and Japan. But more difficult does not mean impossible, nor does it mean it is not critical to begin. As with democracy itself, all the other alternatives may be worse.