Is it Good to Use Good Rhetoric in the Middle East? Posted by Shadi Hamid

Michael Cohen writes in a post last week that

There were many bad elements to President Bush's "Freedom Agenda," but few were worse than the grandiose and overstated rhetoric that he used when talking about democratization. You can't one day deliver a speech in Cairo criticizing the Egyptian government’s lack of adherence to the rule of law and its intimidation of pro-democracy advocates and then later do nothing when an opposition presidential candidate is thrown in prison. Yet, this is precisely what the Bush Administration did.

Unless I’m missing something here, I think Michael’s issue isn’t so much that the Bush rhetoric was grandiose, but, rather, that it was grandiose and Bush failed to back up the rhetoric with action. The problem wasn’t the rhetoric itself, but rather the failure to meet the expectations set by the rhetoric. So, a hypothetical is in order: let’s say X president used grandiose pro-democracy rhetoric, but followed it up with sustained pressure on autocratic regimes to open up their political systems (i.e. through aid conditionality, mobilizing international opinion when opposition leaders are imprisoned, and engaging with nonviolent Islamist groups)? In that circumstance, would we register the same complaints about overblown rhetoric? Some probably would, but then their issue isn’t really the rhetoric, so much as the fact that using such rhetoric binds us to an assertive democracy promotion policy.

In short, when there is a gap between rhetoric and action (i.e. a lot of rhetoric but little action), then there are two ways reduce the gap: either by 1) reducing pro-democracy rhetoric so that rhetoric is congruent with a policy that does not emphasize democracy promotion, or 2) keep pro-democracy rhetoric, but institute an assertive democracy promotion agenda, so that policy becomes congruent with rhetoric.

I suppose one could argue that #2 would be ideal, but that it is not realistic, and that #1 would not be ideal, but is, at least, realistic. This is the kind of conversation the left needs to be having, since, at some point, we will have to figure out what we think about promoting democracy in the Middle East.

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