Dec
16
I, for one, will remember the presidency of George W. Bush not only for its follies and misgivings in the international arena, but also for the briefly refreshing period of Arab reform that managed to inspire a healthy chunk of a new generation in the Middle East to believe that representative government and respect for civil rights can be won from their spiteful rulers. While the majority of the new ‘democracy generation’ would not trace their new found demand for political reform back to the outgoing President or the United States in general, the foreign policy of that nation, and specifically, the political pressures put on the tyrants of the Middle East to reform their ways facilitated that region’s protesters and grass roots activists that repeatedly made headlines around the world.
Over the past 8 years, we have seen movements of political reform, as weak as many of them proved to be, arise from soil long barren to the notion of representative governments and respect for freedoms. In Egypt we saw the protests of Kifaya; Lebanon took a courageous step toward true sovereignty; there were movements for the release of journalists, student protests, and bloggers.
The rhetoric of this outgoing administration tied the freedom of the United States to the freedom of the rest of the world, tying the liberation of people to the pursuit of self-interest. From George W. Bush’s second inaugural address (2005):
“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
The “Freedom Agenda”, as applied to the Middle East through programs such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative, was ultimately abandoned due to rising pressure emanating from an unstable Iraq, requiring a reprioritization of its policies toward the region. While the Iraq war was the most important driver of this change in policy, its failures have influenced three regional developments which have further undermined American policy in the region: Iranian expansionism and its quest for nuclear armament, a failure of Arab states to make progress on political reform, and a perceived hypocrisy on behalf of the United States in its role of democracy promotion.
Thus, it would seem, Obama ‘the pragmatist’ may continue to shy away from the assertive nature of the democracy promotion in the Middle East so characteristic of the Bush administration pre-2006. From Fouad Ajami’s latest piece in the WSJ, “The Return of Realpolitik in Arabia“:
One thing is sure to go with Mr. Bush when he departs to Crawford, Texas: his “diplomacy of freedom.” That diplomacy — which propelled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which drove the Syrians out of Lebanon after they had all but destroyed the sovereignty of that country, and had challenged pro-American allies in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula — is gone for good.
It was an odd spectacle, the time behind us: a conservative American president preaching the gospel of liberty for lands beyond, his liberal detractors at home giving voice to a deep skepticism about liberty’s chances in inhospitable settings. No one was more revealing of the liberal temper — and of things to come — than Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then the point man for foreign policy among the Democrats) speaking in December 2006 about the hazards of believing in liberty’s appeal to Muslim lands. Of President Bush, he said: “He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners’ notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world.” Mr. Biden knew better: He warned the president, he said, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s view of liberty differed from “our view of liberty . . . I think the president thinks there’s a Thomas Jefferson or Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up. And there are none.”
Perhaps there aren’t, and perhaps we’ll never get to find out. I can find much to quarrel with in the foreign policy of President Bush and his administration, and the decisions of the last eight years will certainly have played a role in shaping the succeeding decade. I suspect history will not be so kind to the president, and that is largely his own fault. However, should it completely disappear, the assertion with which reform was pursued in the Middle East, for all its faults, is a development I won’t soon forget.
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