Mideast democracy initiative is reshaped

By Barbara Slavin
USA Today

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WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is scaling back its plan to promote democracy in the "Greater Middle East."

Instead of an aggressive campaign to foster democracy from Morocco to Pakistan, the latest draft of the plan — to be unveiled June 9 in Georgia at a summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations — says "change should not and cannot be imposed from the outside."

President Bush has pressed for the initiative by arguing that a lack of freedom in the region produces frustration that leads to terrorism. But the proposal makes so few demands of incumbent regimes that it is unlikely to spark dramatic change in autocracies such as those in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

It comes at a time when the Bush administration is focused on Iraq and would find it difficult to promote radical change in other countries.

Originally, the plan was to be modeled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which set standards for observance of human rights in then-Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. By contrast, the draft proposes only a "forum for the future" to bring together officials of industrialized nations and the Middle East at "regular" but unspecified intervals, beginning next fall. Discussions on democracy would be voluntary.

The plan also calls for issuing more small commercial loans to poor people and teaching 20 million Arabs to read by 2015.

The scope of the initiative has been narrowed to Arab countries, and the name of the region has been changed from the "Greater Middle East" to the "Broader Middle East and North Africa." Europeans objected to "greater" as reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's "Greater Germany" or Slobodan Milosevic's "Greater Serbia." And Arabs disliked being lumped in with underdeveloped non-Arab countries such as Afghanistan.

The document also adds a strong reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict by saying reforms "will go hand in hand with our support for a just, comprehensive and lasting" peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on the draft, which may be amended before the summit in Sea Island, Ga.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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