Reassessing U.S. Policy Toward Syria and Democracy in the Middle East : หน้า 43/52

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. **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 relauched 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 relauched when two conditions are met. First, the concept of democracy promotion