Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • barack obama
did not allude to this unpleasantness in the speech she gave in the Persian
Gulf kingdom in December.
The truth is that, just as Bush’s bluster didn’t relax the iron grip of Arab
regimes, neither has Obama’s policy of engagement. The president asked
Mubarak to lift Egypt’s state of emergency and permit international observers
to monitor the recent parliamentary election; Mubarak stiffed him on
both counts. Taking engagement seriously has had the effect of demonstrating
its limits as well as its virtues. It’s time to try something else—or something
more.
Was the Doha speech, then, a sign of new thinking Tamara Cofman
Wittes, the State Department’s lead official for Middle East democracy promotion,
insisted that it wasn’t. “We’ve been watching these trends in the
region for quite some time,” she told me. But Clinton’s language was in fact
a sharp departure from the past, and my understanding is that the administration
has been conducting a broad reassessment of human rights and
democracy promotion policy in recent months, though not specifically with
regard to the Middle East. Obama himself seems more willing to use the
kind of moral vocabulary he once regarded with skepticism: Witness his
public welcome in January to Chinese President Hu Jintao, which included
a call for China to accept universal standards of human rights. Obama also
made a point of meeting with five Chinese human rights activists and scholars
the week before Hu’s arrival.
China, of course, will not give much more than lip service to American
calls for reform. But the lesson of Tunisia is that even in the Middle
East, public fury can demolish apparently stable regimes—and do so in a
moment. Some regimes, especially in the Persian Gulf, will be able to continue
bribing restive citizens into submission; some may even retain legitimacy
through good governance and economic mobility. But others will try
to stare down their domestic and foreign critics as internal pressures rise
higher and higher. What then
The answer that some administration officials give—and this does, in
fact, represent a new strain of thinking—is that they have begun to look beyond
regimes in order to strengthen the hand of other actors. In this sense,
Clinton’s swing through the Arab world, which included meetings with local
human rights and democracy activists, was itself the message, as much
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