Middle East Democracy Goals

Improved Essays
The United States must continue to work with other democracies to promote democracy in the Middle East recognizing that quick change is a dream. The United States’ democracy promotion policy must be implemented consistently over the long term, which will last well beyond the end of President Bush’s second term on January 20, 2009. Our goals must be initially modest, and the commitment to change long term. The core elements of a democracy oriented policy are not hard to identify: sustained, high-level pressure on Arab states to respect political and civil rights and to create or widen genuine political space; clear, consistent pressure on Arab states to carry out pro-democratic institutional, legal, and constitutional changes; and
increased
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The United States policy framework will require additional high-level attention and wider support within the administration if it is not to be a futile fix. A serious program of long-term support for Middle East democracy will need to follow these guidelines:
1. The United States must not attempt to marginalize Islamist groups. Instead, the United
States must differentiate between the truly extremist organizations that must be isolated because they are committed to violence and those amenable to working legally to achieve their goals. 2. The United States must develop strategies to encourage a political processes in which moderate Islamists, along with other emerging forces, can compete fairly and over time gain
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incentives to moderate their illiberal ideologies. To do this, the United States needs to acquire
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It wants their oil. It wants cooperation in finding a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The United States cannot afford to antagonize the very regimes whose cooperation it
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seeks. The United States must work with existing regimes toward gradual reform—and this is a good thing.
In conclusion, the lessons from the U.S. experience in postwar Iraq are being derived while the postwar history of the country is still being forged. Even with all the mistakes made by the United States—in failing to plan and prepare adequately for the postwar reconstruction of
Iraq and in imposing a political occupation upon a proud and nationalistic people, suspicious of the West—it is still possible that democracy will take hold and continue to spread throughout the
Middle East.
The odds may be long that the Middle East and particularly Iraq will ever turn into a mature democracy of the sort envisaged by the Bush administration. To his credit, President
Bush recognizes the difficulty of the task in the Middle East. He has affirmed on numerous occasions that "The democratic progress we 've seen in the Middle East was not imposed from abroad, and neither will the greater progress we hope to see. He has also warned

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