U.S. keen on Mideast reforms

The Bush administration made a broad pledge on Thursday to spr-ead democracy and free markets to the Middle East, promising to move beyond the recent focus on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an ambitious but vaguely defined project to transform the region.

Calling the development of freedom in the Middle East the "security challenge and the moral mission of our time," National Security Adviser Condol-eezza Rice said the United States and its allies must make a "generational commitment" to Middle Easterners who live under oppressive and often corrupt governments.

In a speech to the Association of Black Journalists in Dallas, Rice disputed "condescending voices" who say Arab cultures are not ready for freedom. She sa-id, "We've heard that argument before. And we, more than any, as a people, sho-uld be ready to reject it."

"The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham," Rice said, "and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East."

She offered few details of a project whose prospects have been greeted with widespread scepticism, particularly in the Middle East itself, where the depth of the administration's spoken commitment to Arab democracy remains unproven. Historically, U.S. presidents have accepted the stability of autocratic rule.

The White House says that pattern must be broken.

Beyond Baghdad, where the administration is spending $4 billion a month to establish security and a new government, officials are designing a mixture of approaches that range from financial grants and private arm-twisting to public criticism in troublesome cases, such as Syria and Iran.

The goal years from now is a region of increasingly open societies, economic prosperity and representative government. But undemocratic rule remains the norm in a tense area where the United States has extensive oil interests and political relationships that it considers critical to the anti-terror war and Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

"It is a region," Rice said in Dallas, "where hopelessness provides a fertile ground for ideologies that convince promising youths to aspire not to a university education, a career or family, but to blowing themselves up, taking as many innocent lives with them as possible. We need to address the source of the problem."

A central difficulty will be spurring change among such allies as Egypt and Saudi Arabia that have miserable human rights records.

To make significant progress, the United States must also establish a newfound credibility from a low starting point, said independent analysts who predict Arabs will watch carefully to see how much money and political capital the administration invests in the ambitions described by Rice and others.

"How much are we going to lean on Egypt to introduce democratic reforms?" said David Smock, a U.S. Institute for Peace director. "So much of the Arab world is looking to see whether we really believe in democracy, or whether we're making strategic partnerships."

Unlike the Palestinian Authority – in which the White House is intervening deeply in management issues – and other points on the globe from Burma to Venezuela, the administration has not yet called for elections or set specific democratic-minded targets in much of the Middle East. Nor has it often established terms for improved relations.

"The difficulty they face is, since their strategy is incremental change, the initial changes are not going to be very impressive," said Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They're going to have to find ways of convincing Middle Eastern governments that they're serious about this."

Rice, in her Dallas remarks and an op-ed article in Thursday's Washington Post, said the administration intends to work intently with Middle Eastern figures who "seek progress" toward tolerance and prosperity.

She said "patience and perseverance" will be required, and the long-range U.S. commitment would not be primarily military, but diplomatic, economic and cultural.

In Iraq, the Bush administration used force to overthrow Saddam Hussain's Baath Party government and is now undertaking America's most ambitious nation-building exercise since the 1940s.

To entice and cajole others, Bush in May proposed creating a Middle East free-trade area in the coming decade, the State Department is reviewing $1 billion in annual aid to Egypt, and U.S. officials are telling their Arab counterparts that change will weaken radical movements.

The administration secured $145 million this year for democracy, education and economic initiatives in the Middle East.