A Response to Lexington and The Economist on Egypt...

Although I am intent on getting something written - today - on the most recent issue's coverage of business, finance, and economics, I felt I had to respond to two recent articles. One, Lexington's post "Was George Bush Right?" and the other, the cover story about the uprising in Egypt.

Let me state from the outset that I would never presume to suggest I know anything about the Middle East, or Egypt in particular. But I am particularly sensitive to a need to be humble about the state of affairs in highly complex societies and I also think we need to be cautious about rushing out to assess the merits or deficiencies of "democracy promotion" without considering the context of a policy.

Let's start by challenging Lexington's claim that "Mr Bush was indeed a far more active champion of democracy than Mr Obama has been." Is that true? Lexington suggests that Bush "nagged, scolded, bribed and bullied its allies towards greater democracy." and provides as evidence that "The Americans leant on Egypt to hold more open elections in 2005, and in 2006 they talked an astonished Israel into letting Hamas contest Palestinian elections in the occupied territories. Even the Saudis were prevailed on to hold some (men only) local elections". But let's deconstruct this. What were the constraints on the democracy promotion agenda? Even if the US nominally encouraged more "open elections", were they not, as their predecessors, simultaneously providing tremendous amounts of foreign assistance to President Mubarrak and gladly using the services of his intelligence apparatus to detain and torture terrorism suspects? Certainly Hamas did contest elections, and in fact prevailed in parliamentary elections in 2006, but the Bush administration responded by cutting aid programs to Palestians, not by celebrating the democratic process. This is not to suggest that the Bush administration should have forgone its strategic interests in Egypt or that they did not have the prerogative to use aid as leverage to persuade Hamas to moderate its positions. But to suggest that the "freedom agenda" took precedence at the cost of security, which was paramount in the administration, ignores reality, much in the same way that some suggest that the Bush administration changed course of aid programs, spending a greater proportion of development assistance in countries where the policies were more apt to encourage development. We know for a fact that this did not really happen. (Shameless self promotion.)

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