fix articles 374162, taken seriously
We should be the champion of democracy in the world, and human rights can't be separated from democracy. But if Bush expects to be taken seriously on this issue, he'll have to address the contradictions in his own policies. Just months after Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf became Bush's new best friend, he won a new term in an election everyone knows was a fraud. To get a military foothold north of Afghanistan, Bush cozied up to Uzbekistan's longtime dictator, a Stalinist not much better than Saddam Hussein. And Bush still refuses to deal with Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader of the Palestinian Authority. And if Bush wants to be taken seriously, he can't condemn Syrian torturers while at the same time his CIA outsources its interrogations to the same brutal thugs.