73 NEEP: DILEMMAS OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST DILEMMAS OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST: THE “FORWARD STRATEGY OF FREEDOM” Daniel Neep Mr. Neep is head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), www.rusi.org. (This paper develops arguments first articulated in “Echoes of War: Implications for State, Society and Democracy in the Middle East,” Chapter 3 in War in Iraq: Combat & Consequence, ed. Jonathan Eyal, RUSI Whitehall Paper 59, April 2003; and “Forward Strategies of Freedom in the Middle East,” RUSI Newsbrief, Vol. 23, No. 12, December 2003.) A lthough rumors that Washington’s flagship Greater Middle East Initiative would be aborted before it had even come forth into the world proved un- founded, there is still the distinct possibility that the policy will be stillborn when it is unveiled at the G8 Summit in June – in no small part due to successive fiascos in Iraq, including the fallout from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Despite this obvious setback, however, the initiative’s ideological midwives are unlikely to admit defeat back in Washington. This particular modality may have failed, but the notion of the democratization of the Middle East has been receiving more attention than ever before from politicians, policy makers and the media. The reason for this has been well documented: the Bush administration has adopted the mantra of democratization as an answer to the many problems it faces in the region and has deployed the arguments in favor of Middle East democ- racy with increasing regularity in its articulated statements of foreign policy. President Bush himself outlined his administration’s position on democracy in the region during an address given at the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, and he subsequently devoted a major portion of his only speech during his visit to the UK to the same subject. Not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the problems in Iraq, as some in Europe might argue, these two speeches served to crystallize much of the deep thinking done by the administration over the last two-and-a-half years and need to be taken seriously as they shed light on a key element of U.S. thinking. Perhaps more important, the constant use of this rhetoric is filtering through to the level of actual policy. In an effort to overcome the challenges posed by the events of September 11, 2001, to mitigate the failure of the global war on terrorism, to eradicate transnational terrorist net-