The Rights Stuff

In mid-March, right after his tumultuous visit to Israel, Joe Biden enjoyed a much more tranquil day in Amman. While there, he met with leading activists and civil society groups. The next day, the government-affiliated Jordan Times printed a sneering attack on the U.S. vice president, accusing him of clumsily meddling in Jordan’s domestic affairs by meeting "clandestinely" with hopelessly marginal organizations preoccupied with "amassing foreign funds without necessarily having any real message that resonates with the wider public."

This is not an easy time for organizations in the Arab world that seek to be independent of the state. Over the last few years, as "civil society" groups have tested the limits of their freedom and challenged stagnant regimes, states have responded by tightening the screws; throwing up new rules about how NGOs must register with government ministries, which routinely reject such applications; and then criminalizing any activities by nonregistered groups. Jordan’s governing law, passed in 2008 and amended last year, permits the Ministry of Social Development to reject such applications for any reason. Egypt’s Ministry of Social Solidarity has now drafted "reform" legislation that local NGOs fear could reverse the gains of recent years by placing them under stifling state control.

Arab regimes’ intransigence on matters of democracy and human rights poses the same problem for President Barack Obama as it did for George W. Bush, who made the democratic transformation of the Middle East the central message of his second inaugural address, and arguably of his foreign policy. The creation of a free Iraq was supposed to empower democrats across the region and sweep away its entrenched autocrats; a violent civil war and an ambiguous outcome in Baghdad only seems to have strengthened them instead.

In his Cairo speech last June, Obama distanced himself from his predecessor’s blustering language on democracy and refrained from criticizing any specific government in the region, including that of his host, Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since his predecessor Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination. Obama’s goal, after all, was to offer a fresh start, rather than to rub salt in old wounds. Nevertheless, Obama expressed his "unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things," including "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed."

The White House speaks much of the "post-Cairo agenda," and has even appointed a National Security Council official, Pradeep Ramamurthy, to oversee it. Tamara Cofman Wittes, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, observes that what the Cairo speech offered was not so much specific deliverables, but a new basis for the U.S. relationship with the Middle East: "mutual respect, mutual interests, and mutual responsibility." This new mantra, endlessly repeated, covers a range of actual policies: the new bid for Middle East peace, engagement with Iran, the willingness to examine America’s own record on human rights, engagement with ordinary citizens and, yes, civil society.

The first public event of the post-Cairo agenda was last month’s "Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship" in Washington. This was, of course, an apolitical event where, as Obama said in his opening address, "America can share our experience as a society that empowers the inventor and the innovator." But the president also framed the initiative in the soaring terms of his Cairo speech, in which, he recalled, "I pledged to forge a new partnership, not simply between governments, but also between people on the issues that matter most in their daily lives — in your lives." He added his favorite expression of self-approbation: "Many questioned whether this was possible." (Answer: it was.)

The entrepreneurship summit was only the first in a series of such programs: Coming soon are educational exchanges, science envoys, a Global Technology and Innovation Fund, entrepreneurs in residence, and Partners for a New Beginning, which according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will "engage the U.S. private sector in carrying out our vision for a new beginning with Muslims in communities globally."

They seem like fine initiatives. But few will question whether they are possible. Of the pledges Obama made in Cairo, the partnership between people was the most uplifting, and least controversial. The pledge to uphold the rights of free expression and free association, on the other hand, could be understood either as a harmless banality or as a meaningful, and inherently difficult, commitment. The place of democracy in the speech was, in fact, an intensely contested matter; one White House official with whom I spoke says that though democracy advocates have decisively won that debate, the discussion has shifted to "how is that strategy different from the Bush administration, and what priority does it get?"

One way of answering that question is to ask what happens when the doctrine of mutual respect for mutual interests, etc. collides with the regard for such universal values as the right to free expression and association? Do we respect the regimes themselves, and their wish to stay in power at all costs, or do we rather respect the aspirations of citizens to be free of repressive control? How important, in the scale of American concerns, is preserving the hard-won political space within which rights advocates in the Arab world operate? And how can that space best be preserved? Wittes told me the Obama administration is "very focused" on restrictive NGO laws, which "we raise regularly in our discussion with governments." She also made a point of sending me Secretary Clinton’s critical response to the decision by Egypt’s parliament earlier this week to extend the country’s semiperpetual state of emergency by two more years.

But the balance often seems to tip the other way, at least with countries like Egypt with which the U.S. government has important business to transact. Cairo has long chafed at the small portion of the $250 million in annual U.S. development assistance that goes directly to civil society organizations; last year, the Obama administration agreed that all such funding will go only to groups properly registered with the Egyptian government, which "essentially gives the Egyptian regime veto power over the recipients of its civil society direct grants," according to a recent report (pdf) by the Project on Middle East Democracy. (Smaller amounts of such funds continue to come through other entities, including the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative.) The report notes, "There is a widespread perception among supporters of democracy that the administration is focusing too much on improving the ability of current regimes to govern while overlooking the need for pluralism and political competition."

Adocates and scholars have also argued that the Obama administration has been too reluctant to criticize Arab allies by name. As J. Scott Carpenter, a former Bush administration official now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes, by championing civil society (or democracy) in the abstract, without naming names, "you get the feel-good effect without having to deal with the pushback you get from nation-states." And even the feel-good effect won’t last, because "ultimately you undermine your own credibility" with Middle Easterners who have grown cynical about U.S. democracy talk. Of course, Carpenter’s former boss inadvertently proved the limits of a more confrontational policy in the Middle East. In 2005, Bush and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice very publicly challenged Mubarak to hold free and fair elections, but when candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is officially banned, did surprisingly well in the first round and Mubarak sent thugs to beat up and even kill members of the opposition, the White House barely mustered a response.

All this post-Cairo talk about mutuality and new beginnings may be understood as an attempt to repair the damage done by Bush’s Freedom Agenda and to seek to accomplish through engagement and cooperation what Bush manifestly did not get through confrontation. But there is no good reason to believe that Mubarak, or for that matter Jordan’s more genteel King Abdullah II, will respond to blandishments rather than threats. Rulers throughout the region have kept the valves of public debate and political activity shut for so long that they fear, with reason, that opening them could lead to an uncontrollable flood — thus the continued, and growing, restrictions on civil society.

But with Mubarak long past his sell-by date and an election scheduled for 2011, the dynamic can’t last forever. As Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observes, "Egypt is heading towards a train wreck, in terms of a series of elections that can’t be taken seriously, and there has been silence out of Washington. It’s a situation where U.S. silence has become untenable."

There are no easy answers in the Middle East. Even if Obama miraculously brings peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he’d still have the ticking time bomb of Arab autocracy. Educational exchanges and science envoys certainly won’t hurt, but they won’t do much to alter the calculus of the region’s princes and tyrants. One of the few things Washington can do is to push, privately and publicly, to open up the space granted to political parties, NGOs, and, yes, entrepreneurs. Sometimes it matters to be seen doing the right thing, even if it doesn’t work.