Democracy promotion, once the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, has now almost completely been forgotten. It’s been interesting to watch how this has happened. Just two years ago, in the summer of 2005, Condoleezza Rice made a major speech at the American University of Cairo calling for economic and political reform throughout the Arab world. At the time, there was a sense that all this talk of reform by the Bush administration was actually having an effect. Saudi Arabia responded by calling for local elections, Jordan seemed to be making a few steps in the right direction, Egypt held both parliamentary and presidential elections, and human rights activists in Syria became bolder in calling for reform. While none of these changes were revolutionary, they were a step in the right direction and they began to pave the way for greater political and economic freedom in the region.
In the last year, however, the Bush administration has backed off from democracy promotion. As a result, Arab governments have worked to squash domestic calls for reform and undermine the progress that had been made. Syria, for instance, recently put a slough of opposition candidates in prison and Egypt began a more thorough crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood and some leftist groups. The Economist describes the effects of this shift in policy:
Once touted as a “forward strategy for freedomâ€, American policy consisted of badgering repressive governments into opening political space, in the hope that democracy was the surest foil to extremism of the al-Qaeda kind. Such pressure appeared to succeed, a few years ago, in shaming some autocracies into, for example, holding elections of a kind.
More recently, however, the political tide appears to have flowed back against reform. Some governments have concluded that America’s bark is worse than its bite, while in other countries a lot of people may now reckon that, considering the outcome of American-imposed democracy in Iraq, a little oppression may be a worthwhile price for social peace.
Syria, for example, recently sentenced the country’s best-known human-rights advocate to five years in prison for “spreading false informationâ€. Its budding reform movement was floundering anyway, with campaigners fearing being dubbed American stooges. Many Syrians, sensitive to their own religious and ethnic diversity and conscious of sectarian mayhem next-door in Iraq, have reacted passively to their government’s latest crackdown. Egypt’s government appears almost to relish keeping Ayman Nour, runner-up to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s last presidential election (in 2005), in prison under trumped-up charges—just to show it can fend off American scolding. Reforms in arch-autocratic Saudi Arabia have stalled completely, with no audible protest from Washington.
This increasing lack of emphasis on democratic and economic reform is an incredible mistake. Many of these Arab governments have shown themselves to be very susceptible to American pressure and there has been a significant window to bring about some serious, and very positive, changes in the region.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if instead of invading Iraq, the Bush administration had used its political capital to push for reforms throughout the Middle East. The vast majority of Arabs are extremely supportive of such changes and would have responded favorably to such efforts. Instead of anger and further radicalization (as the Iraq War has caused), we would have seen increasingly pro-American sentiments take root in the region. This would have been a much more effective step towards undermining groups like al-Qaeda and winning the war against Islamic terrorism.
(Cross-posted at Foreign Policy Watch)