One way of answering that question is to ask what happens when the doctrine of mutual respect for mutual interests, etc. collides with the regard for such universal values as the right to free expression and association? Do we respect the regimes themselves, and their wish to stay in power at all costs, or do we rather respect the aspirations of citizens to be free of repressive control? How important, in the scale of American concerns, is preserving the hard-won political space within which rights advocates in the Arab world operate? And how can that space best be preserved? Wittes told me the Obama administration is "very focused" on restrictive NGO laws, which "we raise regularly in our discussion with governments." She also made a point of sending me Secretary Clinton's critical response to the decision by Egypt's parliament earlier this week to extend the country's semiperpetual state of emergency by two more years.
But the balance often seems to tip the other way, at least with countries like Egypt with which the U.S. government has important business to transact. Cairo has long chafed at the small portion of the $250 million in annual U.S. development assistance that goes directly to civil society organizations; last year, the Obama administration agreed that all such funding will go only to groups properly registered with the Egyptian government, which "essentially gives the Egyptian regime veto power over the recipients of its civil society direct grants," according to a recent report (pdf) by the Project on Middle East Democracy. (Smaller amounts of such funds continue to come through other entities, including the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative.) The report notes, "There is a widespread perception among supporters of democracy that the administration is focusing too much on improving the ability of current regimes to govern while overlooking the need for pluralism and political competition."
Adocates and scholars have also argued that the Obama administration has been too reluctant to criticize Arab allies by name. As J. Scott Carpenter, a former Bush administration official now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes, by championing civil society (or democracy) in the abstract, without naming names, "you get the feel-good effect without having to deal with the pushback you get from nation-states." And even the feel-good effect won't last, because "ultimately you undermine your own credibility" with Middle Easterners who have grown cynical about U.S. democracy talk. Of course, Carpenter's former boss inadvertently proved the limits of a more confrontational policy in the Middle East. In 2005, Bush and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice very publicly challenged Mubarak to hold free and fair elections, but when candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is officially banned, did surprisingly well in the first round and Mubarak sent thugs to beat up and even kill members of the opposition, the White House barely mustered a response.
All this post-Cairo talk about mutuality and new beginnings may be understood as an attempt to repair the damage done by Bush's Freedom Agenda and to seek to accomplish through engagement and cooperation what Bush manifestly did not get through confrontation. But there is no good reason to believe that Mubarak, or for that matter Jordan's more genteel King Abdullah II, will respond to blandishments rather than threats. Rulers throughout the region have kept the valves of public debate and political activity shut for so long that they fear, with reason, that opening them could lead to an uncontrollable flood -- thus the continued, and growing, restrictions on civil society.
But with Mubarak long past his sell-by date and an election scheduled for 2011, the dynamic can't last forever. As Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observes, "Egypt is heading towards a train wreck, in terms of a series of elections that can't be taken seriously, and there has been silence out of Washington. It's a situation where U.S. silence has become untenable."
There are no easy answers in the Middle East. Even if Obama miraculously brings peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he'd still have the ticking time bomb of Arab autocracy. Educational exchanges and science envoys certainly won't hurt, but they won't do much to alter the calculus of the region's princes and tyrants. One of the few things Washington can do is to push, privately and publicly, to open up the space granted to political parties, NGOs, and, yes, entrepreneurs. Sometimes it matters to be seen doing the right thing, even if it doesn't work.
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