The adoption of the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative by the Group of Eight Industrialized Nations (G-8) at their June 8-10 summit in Sea Island, Georgia represents a diplomatic victory for the United States. The initiative, however, is extremely unlikely to have a noticeable impact on political reform in the Middle East.
While enjoying both quantitative and qualitative advantages relative to U.S. efforts, European democracy policies in the Middle East require significant revision if they are to attain the sophisticated holistic gradualism to which they aspire.
Many in the U.S. who supported the Iraq war are now backing away from it. They blame the debacle on unforeseeable mistakes by the Bush administration. But the failure in Iraq also reflects deeper flaws in US political culture - the belief in the possibility of successful adoption of democracy by all the peoples of the world and simultaneous contempt for the cultures and opinions of those peoples.
If America engages in any more imperial military adventures like the one in Iraq, the long-term consequence may be the collapse of Western democracy, or of the globalized economic system on which American imperial power rests, or both. Patriots and democrats should be doing everything in their power to devise new strategies that will avoid such devastating outcomes.
The United States has enough raw military power to flatten Falluja and Najaf, but has recognized that this power cannot be used without dooming not only the U.S. venture in Iraq, but the entire U.S. position in the Middle East.