The Big Chill: Democracy Promotion in the Arab Middle East

A few months after the September 11^th attacks on New York City and Washington, ‘Amr Musa reportedly remarked, “It is as if reform proposals are raining down on us.” Musa’s indignation might have given the writers, conveners, and sponsors of those proposals pause had the Arab League Secretary-General been less toxic in Washington circles. Nevertheless, his comment captured the sentiment of millions of fellow Arabs who perceived Washington’s newly discovered interest in political change to be a neo-colonial project. While the quality of the work to which Musa was referring was uneven at best and the funders, analysts, policymakers, and journalists associated with it have since moved on, many of the ideas for reform, dialogue, and economic transformation that were critical components of the reform agenda endure.

Five years after President George W. Bush announced the “forward strategy of freedom” in the Middle East, the glow is decidedly off the idea of democracy promotion. One unfortunate consequence is that due to the cycles of scholarship, three new books that explore reform and change in the Middle East might not get the kind of attention they deserve. Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s former Foreign Minister, Tamara Cofman Wittes, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and four scholars from the RAND Corporation — Dalia Dassa Kaye, Frederic Wehrey, Audra K. Grant, and Dale Stahl — have produced three very different, but extraordinarily useful works on what has come to be known as the “democracy agenda.” Muasher, Wittes, and the four RAND scholars are up against a palpable sense of profound ambivalence about a project that the Bush Administration had hoped would be its defining legacy. Only seven months after some editorialists declared that the Arab Spring was upon us, the strong electoral showing of the Muslim Brotherhood in elections to Egypt’s People’s Assembly and Hamas’ outright victory in Palestinian elections coupled with the significant deterioration of the security situation in Iraq, put a chill on democracy promotion that has yet to thaw.

It remains to be seen how President Barack Obama intends to address political change in the Middle East. He spoke and wrote about the issue only sparingly on a campaign trail that was focused on domestic politics. Yet, when the President did address it, he signaled support for political reform and change. In the July/August 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs, candidate Obama wrote, “Citizens everywhere should be able to choose their leaders in climates free of fear. America must commit to strengthening the pillars of a just society. We can help build accountable institutions that deliver services and opportunity: strong legislatures, independent judiciaries, honest police forces, free presses, vibrant civil societies.” And in his Inaugural Address, the new President declared, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Still, the over-exuberance of Bush’s first term and the first year of his second term has injected a new humility into a foreign policy community that is grappling with the limits of American power. The pendulum, it seems, has swung in the direction opposite from the “forward strategy of freedom.” For realists, liberal internationalists smarting from the experience of the last five years, and a diplomatic corps wary of grand plans hatched in Washington, democracy promotion should perhaps be left to...