In his June 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, President Obama paid lip service to the need for greater Middle East democracy. But since then he has done very little concretely to back this up in terms of quiet pressure for democratic change on the part of allies like Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Indeed, the administration’s ramping up of military support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the attempted Christmas day airliner bombing suggests that we’ve gone back to the traditional U.S. policy of reliance on Arab strongmen.

Young guests look out from the upper level over the balcony at the scene in the hall, prior to the speech of U.S. President Barack Obama at Cairo University in Cairo, Thursday, June 4, 2009. President Obama aimed to set a new tone in America’s often-strained dealings with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.      PHOTO: AP/Ben Curtis

One thing is clear: The Bush administration’s institutionalization of the “freedom agenda” as a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy, combined with Obama’s apparent commitment to democracy promotion and the new counterinsurgency paradigm, suggests that, despite appearances that may emerge to the contrary, we are likely to see more continuity than change in U.S. foreign policy.
This is a huge mistake. President Obama runs the risk of falling into bed with the same set of Middle Eastern authoritarians and alienating broad political populations in the region. He may even live to see them blow up in his face for lack of legitimacy, just as the Shah of Iran did in 1979.

The problem with the Bush approach was that in some countries, primarily close U.S. allies, it didn’t really mean what it said, and in others, primarily U.S. adversaries, it had not thought through how to implement the policy in practice. It did great damage to the credibility and effectiveness of U.S. human rights promotion efforts in both circumstances.

In countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, undoubtedly repressive but close allies of the United States, the Bush administration either did not push for change, or, in the case of Egypt, pulled off at the first sign of push-back from the regime. This produced a worst of all worlds outcome whereby the governments resented the Bush administration’s harsh public rebukes making strategic cooperation in other vital areas more difficult, and the people still blamed the United States for the lack of human rights progress in their countries. Further the U.S. has undermined popularly elected democracies while seeking to install or prop up less democratic regimes that are friendlier to U.S. interests.

As a report published last month by the U.S. Institute of Peace argues, there are good reasons for thinking that the lack of democracy in the Arab world is political rather than cultural. Arab authoritarians like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have gotten good at a cynical game of state-managed liberalization, whereby they open up their political systems just enough to convince outsiders that they are “transitioning” to genuine democracy, only to clamp down again once their control is threatened.

All of this has led, in the view of the Institute of Peace report, to an increasingly dangerous political, social and ideological gap between rulers and their societies. And in this struggle between state and society, the U.S. is widely seen throughout the region as selfishly propping up an unjust and corrupt old order.

We have repeatedly attempted to inject democracy into developing proto-countries that we take under our wing, and then when the vicious factional infighting erupts, we shake our heads solemnly and sadly at the intractable unwillingness and even inability of other societies to embrace the institution that some of us have incorrectly decided must be the basis for our success.

Democracy cannot be spread by coercion, whether military or otherwise, as shown by the violent situations in Iraq and Palestine. It’s not possible to promote democracy in Arab countries while simultaneously maintaining critical strategic cooperation with undemocratic Arab countries.

Moreover, we have called insistently for democracy elsewhere, and yet rarely, if ever, in our history has the U.S. itself been seen so poor a model of democracy. We seem to be trapped in a paradox: The same threats that have prompted us to try to shape more liberal outcomes beyond our shores have persuaded us that we can no longer afford to be the open society we were before 9/11. Thus we reserve for ourselves the right to torture prisoners because the stakes of the war on terrorism are so high. And yet it’s precisely at such moments when a nation’s commitments to its principles are tested.

We cannot simply assume that democracy is an unmitigated good for citizens, or a fence against terrorism. The link between democracy and development is slight. And it is ignorant to imagine that democratic states do not foster terrorism. The democratic Philippines produces far more terrorists than does authoritarian China. And many of the jihadists who have murdered civilians in Europe were born and raised in the democratic, cosmopolitan West. Democracy does not cure all ills.

Therefore, the American project in the Middle East is now associated, fairly or not, with regime change and global aggression. It may be that the very word democracy has become so tainted that we will have to put it away until the toxins have leached out.

As we leave behind an era in which America tried to assert democracy by force (and often failed), the question arises: what part of our efforts to spread democracy can we preserve for the future? We need to learn once again to speak to the world with hope — but a hopefulness tempered by a sense of the possible. And this requires clearing away the wreckage of recent years. The Obama administration should dissociate itself fully from the freedom agenda, and only return to the democracy issue once it has come up with entirely new methods and goals.

Jamal Bittar is professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio.