Dealing with the New Middle East

The New Middle East
By Amr Hamzawy, Karim Sadjadpour, Marina Ottaway, Nathan J. Brown, and Paul Salem
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Contents
A. A CHANGED REGION

C. DEALING WITH THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
C.1. Dealing With Iran and the Nuclear Issue
C.2. Finding a Way Forward for Iraq and a Way Out for the United States
C.3. Israel and Palestine
C.4. Balance of Power
C.5. The Issue of Democracy

A CHANGED REGION
After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration launched an ambitious policy to forge a new Middle East, with intervention in Iraq as the driver of the transformation. “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution,” declared President Bush on November 7, 2003. In speech after speech, Bush administration officials made it abundantly clear that they would not pursue a policy directed at managing and containing existing crises, intending instead to leapfrog over them by creating a new region of democracy and peace in which old disputes would become irrelevant. The idea was summarized in a statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the war between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006. Pushing Israel to accept a cease-fire, she argued, would not help, because it would simply re-establish the status quo ante, not help create a new Middle East. The new Middle East was to be a region of mostly democratic countries allied with the United States. Regimes that did not cooperate would be subjected to a combination of sanctions and support for democratic movements, such as the so-called Cedar Revolution of 2005 in Lebanon that forced Syrian troops out of the country. In extreme cases, they might be forced from power.

The Middle East of 2008 is indeed a vastly different region from that of 2001, and the war in Iraq has been the most important driver of this transformation, although by no means the only one. The outcome, however, is not what the Bush administration envisaged. On the contrary, the situation has become worse in many countries. Despite the presence of over 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2007 and an improvement in the security situation, Iraq remains an unstable, violent, and deeply divided country, indeed a failed state. Progress is being undermined by the refusal of Iraqi political factions to engage in a serious process of reconciliation, as the Bush administration has repeatedly warned. Furthermore, with the demise of Saddam Hussein, the balance of power between Iran and Iraq has been broken, increasing the influence of Tehran in the Gulf and beyond. Meantime, Iran continues its uranium enrichment program undeterred by United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions or the threat of U.S. military action.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsolved, but its parameters have changed considerably, with a deep split in the Palestinian ranks and the effects of decades of unilateral Israeli actions calling into question whether a two-state solution can possibly be implemented. Although Lebanon has been largely liberated from direct Syrian domination, the country is deeply divided and teeters on the brink of domestic conflict. The power of Syria has been diminished by the forced withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon, but the country maintains its potential as a spoiler. The threat of nuclear proliferation is not just limited to Iran; from Morocco to the Gulf, a growing number of countries are declaring their intention to develop a nuclear capacity-for civilian use, to be sure, but a nuclear capacity nevertheless. Confessional and ethnic divisions have acquired greater saliency in many countries.

There has been no successful democratic revolution in any Middle Eastern country. Instead, the democratic openings advocated and supported by the United States have either led to sectarian division or revealed the greater popular appeal and strength of Islamist rather than liberal organizations, one of several reasons the United States has retreated from democracy promotion. Far from having leapfrogged over old problems, the United States is now confronting most of the old problems, often in a more acute way, as well as new ones.

This more troubled new Middle East has obviously not been created solely by U.S. policies. Regional state and nonstate actors have shaped and continue to shape its changing reality. But U.S. policies have been a major factor. The underlying thrust of those policies has been confrontation, including the use or at least the threat of force-”preemptive action,” in the words of the September 2002 National Security Strategy. The United States has used force in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in many arenas of the war on terror. The Bush administration also relied on other forms of coercion, calling for UN Security Council resolutions condemning Syria and Iran, or imposing unilateral sanctions, such as those on the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority and on the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Despite occasional forays into diplomacy, as in the successful resolution of conflicts with Libya over terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the theme of confrontation runs through the Middle East policy of the Bush administration and even of the U.S. Congress throughout this period.

To be sure, views in the administration were never unanimous. During President Bush’s first term, Secretary of State Colin Powell represented a much more traditional, cautious, and diplomatic approach to the Middle East, but his views did not prevail. An element of diplomacy was reintroduced in early 2007, at a time when the administration faced spiraling violence in Iraq, the failure of efforts to convince Iran to abandon its efforts to develop nuclear capability, and the refusal of major allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to cooperate on any U.S. initiative unless the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were revived. After rejecting outright the late 2006 recommendation of the independent Iraqi Study Group that the United States should start talking with Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, the administration opened a dialogue of sorts with both in 2007. The Iranian and U.S. ambassadors to Iraq met three times in Baghdad in the course of the year. Secretary of State Rice had a brief encounter with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on the margins of an international conference on the reconstruction of Iraq in Sharm al-Sheikh in May 2007. In November, after much hesitation, Syria was invited to participate in a meeting held in Annapolis to relaunch the Middle East peace process.

But none of these brief diplomatic interludes altered the generally confrontational tone of U.S. policy. The ambassadorial meetings in Baghdad did not prevent President Bush and Vice President Cheney from fulminating about the threat of nuclear Armageddon and a third world war emanating from Iran. Similarly, the publication in December of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concluded that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 prompted a correct White House statement that Iran continued not to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) and to enrich uranium contrary to UN resolutions. However, this valid reminder of Iran’s ongoing challenge to international carnegie endowment for international peace a changed region security was completely overshadowed by belligerent White House statements that U.S. policy toward Iran would remain unchanged, raising the specter of war. Although analysts agreed that the NIE’s conclusions effectively precluded the use of force by the United States against Iran, the White House pointedly insisted the option remained on the table. Similarly, while inviting Syria to Annapolis, the administration did not agree to put on the agenda the issue of the Golan Heights, nor did it hide its opposition to the possibility of Israeli-Syrian negotiations on the matter.

Three clusters of countries and three major issues present particular challenges for the United States in the new Middle East. All of them have been negatively affected by U.S. policies in the last few years. Developments in the Iran-Iraq cluster present significant threats to U.S. security. The Lebanon-Syria cluster is not as threatening, but it has become a highly unstable area that affects the surrounding countries. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has turned from a chronic problem into a major obstacle to cooperation with even friendly regimes in the area. The three clusters are not unrelated to each other, but it is helpful to examine them separately at the outset. U.S. policy makers also confront a set of region-wide problems. The first is the challenge of nuclear proliferation, which is most acute in relation to Iran but goes beyond it, with a growing number of Arab countries talking of developing a nuclear capacity. The second is the dilemma posed for the United States by domestic political struggles in many countries, initially favored by the United States as part of a program of democratic transformations, but from which the United States has backtracked, undermining U.S. credibility and raising questions about its intentions. The third is the growing saliency of sectarianism.

C. DEALING WITH THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

The Bush administration’s attempt to shape a new Middle East has been a major factor in the emergence of the new and extremely problematic realities we have discussed. The United States needs a new approach to this part of the world, based less on confrontation and more on diplomacy, less on ideology and more on reality, and on a narrower definition of U.S. interests. Most of the problems discussed in this report cannot be solved, nor can they be bypassed, by creating a new Middle East, as the Bush administration tried to do. Some of the region’s problems can be alleviated through wise policy; others can at best be contained. Still others will have to be accepted for many years as part of a new Middle East landscape that has changed, but not for the better.

The first principle to guide a new policy should be recognition of the limits to U.S. power in the region-something those in the region are quite aware of. As long as a large-scale troop commitment in Iraq continues, the option to use force as a means to promote change (rather than to protect vital U.S. interests in a crisis), is essentially off the table. Furthermore, high oil prices make producing countries less vulnerable to sanctions or the threat of sanctions, which in any case are always a weak instrument; the largesse of oil producers also helps countries and organizations that are not experiencing the windfall directly.

Equally important is the recognition that U.S. policy in the area has been unnecessarily confrontational, and that in the end this has been counterproductive. U.S. credibility has been undermined by a policy of threats not followed by action. At the same time, this confrontational stance precludes the search for other ways to pursue U.S. interests. A recent example is Bush’s warning to Bashar al-Assad in December 2007 that his patience was running out regarding Syria’s meddling in the politics of Lebanon. The statement implied a threat-Bush had warned Saddam Hussein that his patience was running out shortly before invading Iraq-but had no credibility and was completely ignored by Syria and everybody else. However, it did make it more difficult for the administration to explore how Syria could help the United States protect its interests and also save Lebanon from protracted crisis and a possible slide into violence.

These two principles lead to the conclusion that a new U.S. policy in the near future must be based on a clear perception that this is an extraordinarily unsettled moment in the Middle East and that U.S. policy could easily worsen the situation. New policies must thus be based on a much more modest definition of U.S. interests in the region, one that clearly differentiates between goals that would be desirable and could be pursued in the long run under more favorable circumstances, and interests that need to be protected now.

The most critical U.S. interests are curbing terrorism emanating from the region and protecting the flow of oil. The military/intelligence dimension of curbing terrorism does not require a new policy direction but the continuation and strengthening of efforts already being pursued. The political dimension, on the other hand, depends largely on the outcome of U.S. policy in Iraq and of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The United States needs to recognize that terrorism is not the result of blind hatred of Western civilization, as the Bush administration insists, but rather an extreme response by a few to U.S. policies that most Arabs see as hostile. Similarly, the free flow of oil depends politically on U.S. policy toward Iran and reestablishing the balance of power in the Gulf.

There is no way for the United States to protect the two critical interests of curbing terrorism and protecting the flow of oil without addressing the region’s salient political issues. Thus, the immediate tasks for the United States are: 1) finding a modus vivendi with Iran and limiting nuclear proliferation; 2) disentangling from Iraq without leaving an ungoverned territory behind; 3) getting serious about the peace process and the two-state solution to Israeli and Palestinian concerns; 4) seeing the re-establishment of a regional balance of power that can be maintained mostly by regional actors without the need for a massive U.S. presence with all its negative repercussions; and 5) in the context of a new balance of power, deescalating the confrontation with Syria and defusing the crisis in Lebanon.

C.1. Dealing With Iran and the Nuclear Issue
Due in no small part to Bush administration policies, Iran is now integral to critical U.S. interests, namely, Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear nonproliferation, energy security, terrorism, and Arab-Israeli peace. No matter how unpalatable the behavior of the Iranian regime, refusing dialogue with Tehran will not ameliorate any of these issues, and confronting it militarily will exacerbate all of them.

An approach that seeks to foment regime change in Tehran is similarly counterproductive. In a race between the “regime change clock” and the “nuclear clock,” the latter will almost surely prevail. The Iranian government is not on the verge of collapse, and in the event of an abrupt political change the only groups that are currently both armed and organized are not liberal democrats but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Bassij militia. A policy that keeps the threat of regime change implicitly on the table also gives Iranian leaders, sensing an existential threat from the United States, more, not less, reason to pursue a nuclear deterrent.

Instead of shunning Iran, confronting it militarily, or attempting to change its form of government, the United States should attempt to formulate a nuanced engagement policy in concert with European allies- and, ideally, Russia and China. This policy must seek diplomatically to modify Iranian policy by weakening the country’s hard-line minority and strengthening its moderate majority-at present, U.S. policy plays into the hands of hardliners. Pragmatic Iranian officials need to be able to argue with plausibility that a moderate Iranian approach will trigger a more conciliatory Western response. They cannot do so today. Given recent history and the Bush administration’s frequent evocations of the military option, calls for moderation are easily dismissed as naïve and irresponsible.

While an engagement approach should eventually be comprehensive, the United States should focus initially on Iraq, because the United States and Iran share an interest in retaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and containing a bloody civil war. A U.S.-Iranian dialogue about Iraq should deal with the central issue of the nature and presence of an ongoing U.S.presence in Iraq on one side and Iran’s policies and activities in support of various Iraqi factions on the other.

Eventually, if enough confidence is built, the discussion should extend to the nuclear issue, but in the present atmosphere of confrontation there is no common ground between Washington and Tehran on that problem. Iran’s fractious leadership has formed a consensus to resist outside pressure to relinquish its claimed right to enrich uranium. Such consensus is relatively unusual in Tehran and various factions would find it risky to deviate from this position. Iranian leaders judge that the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and others cannot impose costs great enough to compel Iran to indefinitely suspend, let alone abandon, enrichment. Therefore Tehran will be highly unlikely to accede to U.S. demands in a negotiation on the nuclear issue, unless Washington (with perhaps Russia or another country acting as broker) were to accept a formula whereby Iran could continue some level of enrichment activity under intensive international monitoring. As long as the United States and the UN Security Council do not change their demands, or Iran does not feel much weaker, this issue holds little promise of diplomatic progress. Concentrating on the broader security relationship in Iraq and the Gulf is therefore more promising. Here, a mix of confidence-building diplomacy and deterrence can be pursued, involving Iran’s neighbors as well as outside powers.

Engaging Iran in no way implies appeasement, nor does it preclude efforts to warn other countries of or contain Iranian influence and policies that are problematic. It must be made clear to Tehran that a hard-line approach will only increase the country’s political isolation and economic malaise. UN Security Council resolutions and international political and financial pressure on their own will not bring about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran; nonetheless, in the short term, they are necessary tools to show that a belligerent approach will not reap rewards.

At the same time, the United States needs to keep in mind that Iran will never agree to any arrangement in which it is expected to publicly retreat or admit defeat, nor can it be forced to compromise through pressure alone. Besides the issue of saving face, Iran’s political elite-chiefly Ayatollah Khamenei-believe that compromise as a result of pressure projects weakness and will only encourage the United States to demand more.

The results of a successful engagement policy-beginning a difficult process of reintegrating Iran into the global economy and improving Iranian ties with the United States-will provide more fertile ground for political reform in Tehran and dilute the control of hard-liners, who thrive in isolation. For this reason, a small but powerful clique with entrenched economic and political interests in the status quo will do everything in their power to torpedo attempts at reconciliation. By eschewing dialogue, Washington plays into the hands of these Iranian hard-liners.

To be sure, engagement offers no guarantees of success. It is the Iranian government that ultimately must make a strategic decision to change its own policies. The best thing Washington can do is maintain dialogue with Iran, simultaneously present it with two distinct paths forward, and let it be known that when Tehran is ready to rethink its policies and emerge from isolation, there will be a partner in Washington ready to welcome it.

C.2. Finding a Way Forward for Iraq and a Way Out for the United States
The formulation of a new policy on Iraq must start from an admission that the political process of reconciliation and state-building in Iraq is dead in the water. Since military efforts alone cannot stabilize the country for long, as U.S. commanders in Iraq readily admit, a new process must be put in place as soon as possible. A new political process must start not from prescriptions for what Iraqis should do and what the country should become-that policy has been tried already and it has failed-but from an inventory of the political players, their goals, and their relative power and influence as they are, not as we wish they were. This inventory would have to include all political players, including less palatable armed ones. This would be the first step.

The second step would be to put the country’s feckless parliament and government on notice that they are not automatically the central players in the reconciliation process. They have been given ample time to launch a process on their own, to bring in excluded groups and broaden their base of support, and they have failed to do so. In order to maintain a central role, they would have to take some initiatives; otherwise other actors would become more important.

The third step would be to bring all groups together in a kind of Iraqi loya jirga with the help of the United Nations, other international organizations, and Iraq’s neighbors. This is a good time to attempt again to internationalize the problem of Iraq. The United Nations has reopened its offices, and Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, have expressed an interest in reopening embassies in Baghdad. In general, this is a period of heightened diplomatic activity in the region. As long as the United States does not interpret “internationalizing” to mean pressuring other countries and international organizations to carry out and pay for policies already formulated in Washington, the effort could succeed.

Opening a dialogue among political factions is a radical departure from past U.S. policies toward political reconciliation, which have been based on a U.S. model of what Iraq should look like as well as on the fiction that the only legitimate political players in Iraq are the few that participated in the election the United States organized. These factions will resist any attempt to bring other players into the process, as they have done all along. It must be made clear to them that they will soon be on their own unless a broader agreement is reached, because the United States will not continue to support them indefinitely.

C.3. Israel and Palestine
U.S. core interests in the region include peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which would have as a corollary peace between Israel and all Arab countries. The only solution at present that can lead to peace while preserving the existence of the state of Israel and protecting Palestinian rights is the two-state solution. But it will not be easy to bring the two-state solution back from the dead.

Its benefits are obvious. Both Israel’s security and its identity will be better protected, a portion of Palestinian national goals will be minimally met, the threat of wider war in the region will decrease, and U.S. diplomatic and security strategies will be easier to pursue. But the pay off of such a solution should not be oversold-it will lead not to a historic reconciliation among peoples or the full integration of Israel into the region but to a very cold peace, like the one that exists between Israel and Egypt-a manageably cantankerous relationship between Israel and its neighbor.

The elements necessary to revive a two-state solution are easy to identify. On the Palestinian side, the leadership must be strong enough to negotiate authoritatively on behalf of its national community-and this will require reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. The Palestinian leadership must also be convinced-and be able to convince other Palestinians of the political and economic benefits of a two-state solution. This, in turn, necessitates not only the clear “political horizon” that the Bush administration has been pressing but also a set of short-term measures to revive Palestinian economic fortunes and social fabric. In this regard, the massive international aid program is helpful, but it is simply no substitute for an end to Israeli restrictions on the movement of people and goods.

On the Israeli side, actions that undermine the two-state solution must not only be stopped but also reversed. This means a real freeze on all settlement construction, including in areas Israel claims are exempted because they have already been annexed to Israel, as well as preparations for removal of settlements that are illegal even under the permissive Israeli legal framework. Further down the line, it means that Israel will have to negotiate compensatory territorial exchanges for settled areas that will not be incorporated into a Palestinian state.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, furthermore, will need to convince their respective populations that the commitments they have received through negotiations are credible and enforceable, and not subject to reversal by extremist action or by the next set of election returns. These requirements will require difficult diplomatic efforts and painful domestic choices. But what is most daunting is that pursuit of these requirements pulls in some very different directions. It may seem virtually impossible to bring Hamas and Fatah back together, while simultaneously convincing Israelis that the Palestinian commitment to a two-state solution is real. To ask that Israel ease travel restrictions on Palestinians and remove settlements would not be easy under any circumstances, but any American leadership will find it especially difficult to undertake these tasks in order to strengthen a Palestinian leadership in which the Israelis have little faith.

But it is impossible to turn back the clock to more propitious circumstances. The biggest tension-between integrating Hamas and denying the movement its proclaimed goal of destroying Israel-can only be met by building on one of the few diplomatic successes the Bush administration has had: the involvement of Arab states. By cornering Hamas between regional pressure and domestic opinion demanding prosperity, it may be possible to wrest Hamas from pursuit of the most extreme elements of its agenda. It is unrealistic to expect a total repudiation by Hamas of its vision of an Islamic state, but it is possible to work toward a situation in which the movement’s leaders are compelled to accept that the logic of events is leading in a direction they are powerless to stop (as actually happened for a brief period in the 1990s).

Thus, the United States must cease pretending that Abu Mazin heads a viable Palestinian protostate, that he has sufficient domestic legitimacy to conclude an agreement, and that the harsh isolation of Gaza can be calibrated carefully enough to lead the population to embrace the Fatah-led government in Ramallah and still prevent starvation. There can be no harm (and there may be some good) in attempting to sketch out what an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty would look like, partly because it would force a far greater level of political honesty from leaders on both sides than existed during the Oslo period. But such efforts cannot supplant the longer-term and more difficult task of resuscitating a viable Palestinian leadership. That task will require that the United States convert from a policy based on severe sanctions against Hamas and the territory it controls and instead come to terms with a revival of a Palestinian national unity government like the one that existed until June 2006. The United States must then support the conclusion of a cease-fire between the new united Palestinian government and Israel and promote an agreement among Palestinian groups on mechanisms for negotiating longer-term issues with Israel.

C.4. Balance of Power
The regional balance of power that was maintained by Iraq and Iran has been broken with the demise of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent collapse of Iraq. As a result, the United States and some of Iraq’s neighbors worry about the growing power of Iran and are seeking to restore some balance by using different approaches. The United States has tried to restore that balance through its own presence in Iraq and by trying to form an anti-Iranian alliance. Arab countries, especially those around the Gulf, have been searching for alternative policies combining containment and diplomacy. In 2007, the Gulf countries signed various weapons deals with the United States, Britain, and Russia in what seemed to be the beginning of a regional arms race aimed at counterbalancing Iran. But they have also reached out diplomatically to Iran.

In view of the failure of U.S. policy so far, the diplomatic activities of Arab countries need to be recognized and, if possible supported, in conjunction with the policy of engagement toward Iran suggested earlier. Arab diplomatic efforts, if successful, hold the possibility of restoring a balance of power that is not entirely dependent on a long-term, large U.S. military presence with its financial costs and negative political repercussions in the region. The United States has not been part of these initiatives and does not trust them, fearing that they are simply a sign that Gulf countries are capitulating to Iran. In reality, concern about growing Iranian power is real among all countries in the region and the diplomatic activity is an effort to contain it.

There are many indications as well that Arab countries are seeking their own ways of dealing with Iran. President Ahmadinejad in December 2007 was invited to attend the meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha. While the invitation was apparently less than full hearted, and all Gulf countries remained extremely worried about Iran’s nuclear problem, the invitation also was one more sign that Iran’s neighbors were shunning confrontation. Finally, the Saudi government, historically close to the United States, made it clear it was seeking to diversify its external support. In February 2007 it hosted President Vladimir Putin in Riyadh and announced a flurry of new trade agreements. In November 2007 Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz visited Moscow to discuss, among other issues, a large Saudi purchase of Russian weapons.

U.S. policy toward Lebanon and Syria, elevated in recent years to the status of a confrontation between democracy and autocracy or even theocracy, needs to be brought back to a more realistic perspective. To be sure, a sovereign and functioning Lebanon would contribute to the stability of the Levant, but, in a vicious circle, Lebanese sovereignty cannot be restored as long as the region is so unstable: for decades now, political factions in Lebanon have been more than willing to sacrifice the country’s sovereignty by inviting in outside allies to further their own goals. As long as the region remains unstable, all Lebanese factions will find allies willing to support them for their own ends. And while a Syria closely allied to Iran and hostile to Israel is a destabilizing element in the Levant, the solution is not to confront Syria but to support the peace process, including Israeli-Syrian negotiations about the return of the Golan Heights, and to deal more effectively with Iran. The problem of the Lebanon-Syria cluster is the consequence of a wider crisis, not its cause, and must be tackled as such.

In practice, this means that the United States needs to encourage and support compromise and reconciliation within Lebanon. Since the end of 2007, the United States has started recognizing the need for compromise among the political factions on the issue of the choice of a new president. That policy must be continued more explicitly and firmly. In fact, it is important for the United States to step back and let countries in the region take the lead in pushing the Lebanese toward reconciliation. The United States should be aware that a com promise solution will currently entail an armed Hizbollah and continuing Syrian influence.

The best that U.S. policy can achieve in Lebanon is a country that is neither completely dominated by Syria nor a battleground for U.S. and Israeli confrontations with their enemies in the region. This can be achieved by supporting the election of a compromise president as part of the formation of an inclusive national unity government, the drafting of a new election law, and the holding of parliamentary elections on schedule in the spring of 2009.

A new policy toward Syria also needs to recognize the country for what it is: a small country without massive ambitions or ideological crusades, trying to maintain some role in the region. The confrontational tone of U.S. policy, coupled with the setting up of the Hariri tribunal by the United Nations, has made the regime paranoid. The goal of U.S. policy must be not simply to corner and threaten Syria, but to convince it to end its spoiler role in Lebanon and encourage it to put some distance between itself and Iran.

C.5. The Issue of Democracy
We have not listed democracy among core U.S. interests in the Middle East because of the deep contradiction between long- and short-term U.S. interests entailed in any true process of democratic transformation. In the long run, a Middle East populated by stable democratic countries would be an extremely positive development for the United States, and, of course, for citizens of Arab countries. In the short run, the path to democratic transformation may well complicate rather than facilitate U.S. relations with Arab countries and lead to outcomes the United States will not like. Furthermore, the policies of the last few years, which have created confusion between democracy promotion and regime overthrow, have created a legacy of suspicion that will be difficult to overcome in the short run. While the United States cannot completely abandon the democracy agenda, given internal demands for change in Arab countries, democracy promotion needs to be relaunched as a long-term goal of the United States, to be pursued quietly and consistently.

The American push for Arab democracy between 2003 and 2005 was not misguided in its essence, but it was pursued in such a clumsy and manic manner that the credibility of democracy promotion has been seriously undermined. From the beginning, the United States talked indiscriminately of democratization both for countries where a path to democratization was visible, Egypt for example, and for others, such as Saudi Arabia, where it was difficult to even imagine where a process of transformation should begin. Also, while American leaders spoke of a long-term, generational struggle, they showed great impatience in practice. They also pursued democracy promotion policies heedless of the conditions prevailing in individual countries and thus of the probable consequences of the policies they were promoting. The United States quickly recoiled when initial efforts led to results it neither anticipated nor was willing to accept, such as the victory of Hamas in Palestine and the strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As a result, when the Jordanian government cracked down on professional associations, when the Bahraini government lashed out at demonstrators calling for constitutional reform, and when the Egyptian government turned to military court trials and long prison sentences to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, the U.S. government looked at short-term security interests and kept silent.

The democracy promotion agenda requires a complete rethinking. The policies of the Bush administration, already languishing, should be allowed to die quietly and new policies only relaunched when two conditions are met. First, the concept of democracy promotion must be clearly defined; in the Middle East, the concept of democracy promotion has fluctuated from aggressive rhetoric of regime overthrow at one extreme to small, little noticed, probably not very effective but innocuous educational, women’s rights, or cultural exchange programs at the other end. This has created a great deal of confusion. Inevitably, attention in the Middle East has focused mostly on the threatening tone, the rhetorical statements, and the glaring discrepancy between rhetoric and actions. The idea of democracy promotion needs to be clearly differentiated from that of regime overthrow, not only because the conflation of the two ideas is counterproductive, but because the overthrow of even the most tyrannical regime does not necessarily lead to democracy, as Iraq shows. Separating regime overthrow from democracy promotion is not just a question of language, but also of tools used in promoting more open political regimes. Sanctions, for example, should have no part in a program of democracy promotion.

Second, the United States must make sure that it understands the probable consequences of the policies it launches and is willing to accept them. This will require a more honest and realistic assessment of the situation that prevails in each country. Political openings bring to the fore whatever political forces exist in a country, not simply a general desire of citizens to be free. Unless those forces are understood, country by country and case by case, the United States will not be able to act consistently and avoid the backtracking that has undermined its credibility in recent years.

Finally, a new policy of democracy promotion must focus on the most likely candidates for reform, the semi-authoritarian states with varying degrees of pluralist politics, such as Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen. In such countries, U.S. efforts need to focus on clearly defined goals, tailored to needs and conditions of each country. Efforts should not be wrapped up in ambitious-sounding but ultimately empty regional programs, such as the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative.

As for countries that do not yet have either the state institutions to support a democratic system or independent, organized political forces, the United States needs to recognize its fundamental lack of knowledge about how a process of political reform could unfold there. In such countries, efforts should concentrate on nudging regimes toward reforms that could be introduced from the top, such as an improvement in the human rights situation, more press freedom, and more freedom to operate for civil society organizations. At the same time, the United States should be careful not to misrepresent and praise marginal top-down changes as democratization, as the Bush administration has often done when heaping praise on countries like Bahrain and Oman.

Long-term efforts to promote political change must be pursued quietly. No matter how carefully future policies are shaped, conflicts will inevitably arise between short-term security interests and long-term democratization. It would help if U.S. policy makers were franker-and more sophisticated-about the problem. Arab governments and reform advocates already know that American values and American interests do not always coincide. Pretending that this is not the case serves no purpose except to undermine credibility when the inevitable discrepancies between high principles and political necessity become glaring.