Why democracy stirs in Mideast

The Middle East produced its own crop of democracy advocates in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, much as Eastern Europe did, Mr. Gerges recalls. But they were muffled from within and met with no forceful support from outside.

"There were many people enthusiastic about building civil societies: That was the buzzword of the 1990s. But they were suppressed at their birth by the Assads and the Mubaraks" and other authoritarian regimes, he says. "Then two things happened that no one could ignore: the Sept. 11 attacks on the US and the political emancipation of the Iraqi people."

But not all the moves toward change should be seen as having the same impetus, specialists say. Most see Mubarak's proposal for multiparty presidential elections as the clearest case of a direct response to new pressures from Washington. And Bush is keeping up pressure, using the Defense University speech to advise his friend Mubarak of what the presidential elections would have to offer in order to pass the democracy test: "freedom of assembly, multiple candidates, free access by those candidates to the media, and the right to form political parties."

Other cases, like Lebanon, are more suggestive of the mix of pressures - internal and external, political and economic - that are at play.

Kuwait is a case suggesting that the winds of political change have been blowing for a while, certainly before Sept. 11. Sometime in the next few weeks, the Kuwaiti parliament is expected to vote on a government-backed reform to allow women the right to vote and hold political office. The reform was first proposed in a 1999 edict by the ruling emir but lost by two votes in a parliamentary vote.

Many experts also point out that the Arab Human Development Reports, widely considered the most comprehensive and critical calls for Arab reform of recent years, were launched by the United Nations Development Program in 2000 and were researched and written by Arabs.

"To hear so much talk of change in the Middle East resulting from the war in Iraq, it's as if the Arabs have no idea or meaningful tradition of reformist thinking," says Clovis Maksoud, a Lebanese development specialist at American University in Washington who is also on the board of the Arab Human Development Reports.

Just back from the Middle East, Mr. Maksoud says he encountered a growing irritation among Arabs, "a feeling that the US, which did not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is now trying to snatch away these political movements and lay claim to them."

That raises further questions of why the Middle East bloom is on right now. Bush reduces it to a universal hunger for democratic freedoms, but others say the explanation lies elsewhere.

"People in these countries have a strong sense that things have gone wrong, but they are not convinced that democracy is the answer," says Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "What they really want are better results."

That means people want jobs and better living conditions and services, he says, than what their current government regimes are delivering. But they don't necessarily see democracy as the answer, and that is where the Bush doctrine of democratic reform as the universal answer and local perceptions may end up in conflict. "The real challenge we face," says Mr. Alterman, "is that there is no widespread belief that American-style democracy delivers better results."

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