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For my advice to the people on the west with regards to the Muslim world is to leave them alone. They are perfectly fine, they are perfectly capable of creating their own societies, their own cultures, their own democratic frameworks and they do not need our help.
They could use our financial help, no question about it; I think that we could do a lot more in investing in the civilian and democratic infrastructures of countries like Egypt and Iran. But, the way that our foreign policy in the United States and the larger western world has been almost single mindedly focused on our economic and security interests in that region, that has in some ways, retarded the development of the social and political, and even religious development of that region.
We are not helping is what I would essentially say, but we can help. We can help by offering a platform and a venue for oppositional forces in that region. Even if those oppositional forces are religiously inclined in order to express themselves and to share their views, and their ideas within the larger market place of ideas, and to allow the Muslim world and particularly these nation states. The citizen of these nation states to make decisions for themselves about what kind of country that they want, what kind of government they want.
We cannot simply shutdown the democratic process if the people that we want to get elected do not get elected that is not how it works, and so we have to understand that a process is underway in the Middle East. It is going to be long process, it is going to be a violent process and it is going to be bumpy one. It is going to happen with or without us, it will happen more smoothly with our help but that help has to come with the recognition that our sole purpose is to foster these kinds of reform movements, not to define them.
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