A sudden, powerful stirring

Fouad Ajami:
In retrospect, it was an appearance by President George W. Bush before the National Endowment for Democracy, in November 2003, that signaled the birth of a new "diplomacy of freedom" in the Arab world. The American military effort in Iraq was in its early stages then; the euphoria of the military campaign had ended, and a war of attrition had begun. Saddam Hussein was still on the loose, and there was no trace of those vaunted weapons of mass destruction that had taken us to war. At that uncertain hour, Bush proposed nothing less than a break with the ways of American diplomacy in the region. "Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run," he said, "stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export."

Today the Arab world is beset by a mighty storm. For decades, the American choice in Arab-Islamic lands was stark. The "civil society" there was truculent and malignantly anti-American, while the rulers seemed like eminently reasonable men willing to strike bargains in the shadows. It was easy to accept their authoritarianism as the cultural practice of the Arabs: This was what Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

...

We know that America has paid dearly for this democratic movement, in both blood and treasure, for this democratizing push was given force by Iraq's elections. But the outlines of a new Arab world may now be dimly seen. A brilliant American officer, Lt. Col. Mark Martins, whom I met in Baghdad, allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. "Democracy is not a luxury car," he E-mailed me last week. "It is an all-terrain vehicle and good for fighting insurgency."

We now take democracy on those hard Arab roads. It is their world, and they must repair it. But they hang on Bush's words, in Damascus and Beirut, and in Cairo as well.