7. November 2003: Under pressure over the rising insurgency in Iraq, President George Bush is calling on Americans to support a new vision of “freedom” in the Middle East that makes a break with six decades of US policy of supporting autocratic regimes. Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said that in a speech Mr Bush was to make yesterday he would promote “the new opportunity for a forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East”. His call is being compared with president Ronald Reagan’s appeal to eastern Europe in 1983 to abandon communism. Dr Rice said: “After 60 years of trying to find stability through regimes that were not devoted to political liberty for their people, what we found is that we did not buy security of stability but rather frustration and pent-up emotions in a region that has fallen behind in terms of prosperity and in fact continues to produce ideologies of hatred.”