Shadi Hamid: Reviving Bush's Best Unfulfilled Idea ... Democracy Promotion

Shadi Hamid is director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Crises have a way of provoking interesting, occasionally useful intellectual debates. September 11 was no exception, forcing foreign policy analysts and policymakers to grapple with bigger ideas. Oddly enough, it was some in the Republican Party who made perhaps the most radical argument, that the attacks that day were, in fact, a direct result of Middle East's democratic deficit. In the absence of freedom, Arabs lacked legitimate outlets to express their political grievances, making them more likely to resort to political violence and terrorism.

This formed the intellectual justification for the Bush administration's rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion and for what would later become the "forward strategy for freedom." As President George W. Bush and senior officials like CondoleezzaRice were fond of saying, "the status quo is untenable." The status quo was untenable.

But to draw a link between Bush's policies and the Arab revolts -- as some neoconservativesinsist on doing -- makes little sense. In Arab eyes, Iraq became a model not of what to do, but what to avoid. That said, actions have unintended consequences.

Would the Arab spring have happened without September 11? With so many variables at play, it is a difficult counterfactual to entertain. What we do know, though, is that the 2000s, alongside Bush's democracy promotion program, were a breakthrough for democracy in the region...