From the Baltics to Beijing, from Sarajevo to South Africa, time after time this President has sided with the status quo against democ ic change with familiar tyrants rather than those who would
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overthrow them, with the old geography of oppression rather than a new map of freedom. The pattern was most glaring in Mr. Bush's treatment of Iraq prior to the invasion of Kuwait and the later failure to support Saddam Hussein's opponents after the success of Desert Storm.
I supported the President's effort to drive Saddam out of Kuwait and I respect very much the conduct of the war itself. But now we are learning how the administration appeased Saddam in the months prior to August of 1990 and at best sent him mixed signals of what we would do if he invaded Kuwait. Even after the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, after Saddam had gassed his own people, his own Kurdish population, this administration continued to coddle Iraq with economic credits, licensed military useful technology and offered an obliging silence about Iraq's savage human rights record.
In keeping with the President's directive to woo Saddam, the State Department even wrote an apology after the Voice of America dared to criticize Iraq's tyrannical regime.
My administration will stand up for democracy. We will offer international assistance to emerging fragile democracies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and create a Democracy Corps to help them develop free institutions. We will keep the pressure on South Africa until the day of true democracy has dawned. (Applause.)
We will stand by Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East and press for more (applause) -- and while supporting the peace process will press for more accountable governance throughout the region and work for demilitarization and to make sure that weapons of mass destruction do not enter the hands of tyrants all too willing to use them.
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We will link China's trading privileges to its human rights record and its conduct of trade of weapon sales. (Applause.) We will support a Radio Free Asia, like Radio Free Europe, to carry news and hope to freedom loving people in China and elsewhere. will buttress democratic forces in Haiti, Peru, Cuba and throughout the Western Hemisphere. We will make the United States a catalyst for a collective stand against aggression, the action I have urged for some time in response to Serbian aggression in Bosnia, one with which, thankfully, the Bush administration now agrees, after the President's Press Secretary once called it reckless.
No test of presidential leadership is more important than the President's action as commander-in-chief. The threats to America may change, but a president's willingness to confront them must be
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