Obama's Middle East Democracy Problem

The Obama administration’s quiet approach to promoting freedom in the Arab world is about to meet its first major test.

BY BARBARA SLAVIN | MARCH 5, 2010

Barack Obama entered office last year promising a sweeping reinvention of America's image in the world, most of all in the Middle East, where George W. Bush saw his ambitious agenda of democratic transformation meet with the reality of a region deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and locked into stagnant authoritarian regimes.

As part of that reinvention, the Obama administration has changed the tone of U.S. interaction on the democracy front. Administration officials have espoused democratic principles in general -- as the president did in his eloquent June speech in Cairo, in which he pointedly criticized Arab regimes' lack of accountability to their people -- but shied away from direct confrontation. The question is whether this behind-the-scenes approach will be any more successful than Bush's in-your-face policy.

The first major test of the Obama administration's stance will come in the next few weeks when Egypt is likely to renew a 29-year-old emergency law that gives the government extraordinary powers to stifle political opposition. Egypt has been promising for years to replace the law -- imposed after the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Islamist terrorists -- with more limited counterterrorism legislation. But somehow the new law is never ready and the "emergency" endures.

If the past year is any guide, the U.S. State Department will express disappointment, but neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will publicly criticize the government of President Hosni Mubarak -- the sort of high-level rebuke of which global headlines are made.

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Under the Obama administration, democracy promotion in the Middle East is clearly not a major regional priority. Clinton made that plain in a speech Feb. 14 in Qatar, in which she listed promoting human rights fifth and last following the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, combating violent extremism, and promoting opportunities for young people.

In the administration's defense, it took office at a time when the muscular Bush model of democracy promotion had been largely discredited and abandoned. The 2003 Iraq invasion at first spooked other Arab regimes into reforms -- and then convinced them to retreat as Iraq descended into sectarian warfare. Elections in Iraq, Egypt, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon strengthened IslamistU. groups at the expense of secular parties. The biggest setback came in 2006, when Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections that were held at the insistence of then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images

 

Barbara Slavin is a former assistant managing editor of the Washington Times and former senior diplomatic correspondent for USA Today and has covered the Middle East and U.S. policy toward it extensively. She is also the author of a 2007 book on the United States and Iran, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies.

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TOM PAINE

4:05 PM ET

March 8, 2010

From top-down democracy promotion to bottom-up political rights

There were two major problems with "democracy promotion" under Bush which makes highly advisable the Obama Administration's change of policy and discourse, when it comes to advancing the cause of political rights, both in the Middle East and elswhere.

First, the Bush Administration started promoting democracy fairly conspicuously as the soft-power companion policy to the hard-power road show of the Iraq war, and the latter discredited the former throughout the world. One of Bush's justifications of a war of choice involving the invasion of a Muslim nation is that this would produce a shining exemplar of democracy in the Middle East -- only that justification neglected to notice that the cost entailed the lives of 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Hopefully the Washington policy establishment, so focused on ways to rearrange the Middle East to its liking, can forgive Arabs and others who actually live in the Middle East from finding that cost too high.

Second, "democracy promotion" largely meant top-down structural assistance geared to producing elite-to-elite transfers of power from authoritarian types to pliable centrist democrats through some sort of unspecified electoral process, accompanied by anguished but selective denunciations of regimes in the region who were on Washington's enemies list, particularly Iran. None of this worked. The Lebanese "Cedar Revolution" threw off the Syrian yoke without Washington's help. There were successful anti-corruption campaigns in a couple of the Gulf states. End of successes on the regional democratization front.

So perhaps we can lay off condemnation of the Obama Administration for not throwing good money after bad, when it comes to "democracy promotion." Scott Carpenter's quote is especially emblematic of what does not produce change, namely that there needs to be "a strong voice at the top telling ambassadors that this is a priority." Yes, of course, Obama screaming at American ambassadors will produce a fancy new regional necklace of Arab democracies. Nonsense.

Obama shows evidence of recognizing this. Instead of denouncing regimes, which makes for rah-rah copy inside the Beltway and among diaspora activists, Obama's remarks in Cairo and about the Green Movement in Iran last year, are indicative of a far more fruitful way of generating worldwide support for political rights, which are after all the real indicator of democratic progress. He suggested that the way a government treats its people's peaceful dissent is a proper test of its legitimacy, and in so many words subsumed all political rights within the right of freedom of self-expression, which he noted was part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. So instead of a Washington scheme to promote democracy via regime change, he suggested that it's all about the universal right of the people to speak freely and protest without repression. Down the road of embracing that as the real test of how the U.S. engages with governments is the kind of "democracy promotion" that will generate a growing global constituency for political rights.