Margaret Weiss: George W. Bush, Disliked But Appreciated

Margaret Weiss is a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.

The foreign policy of the United States is not a top concern for most Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet and are afflicted with growing election fever. However, in the Arab world Washington’s foreign policy has many feeling disappointed and abandoned as they continue to struggle more than a year into the Arab uprisings. Despite the initial enthusiasm for President Barack Obama, the administration’s reactive, incoherent policies toward the Arab uprisings have some Arabs reminiscing about the Bush years.

During a recent trip to Egypt, I heard the deputy head of a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization that champions racial, religious, gender and political tolerance mention that he and his friends made John McCain T-shirts before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He explained that he evaluated U.S. presidents based on their efforts to spread democracy, and believed that President George W. Bush had put more pressure on the Egyptian government than Democratic presidents, because the Democrats were more concerned with maintaining good relations with Cairo. My source added that most Egyptians indisputably disliked Bush, but there was no love lost for Obama either. Furthermore, he believed a survey of Egyptian democracy activists would find that most preferred Bush to Obama.

Indeed, Egyptian human rights democracy advocate Hisham Kassem has been quoted saying that the Bush administration was the first to seriously address democratization in Egypt. According to Kassem, “The year 2005 was the best year my generation has seen. I am openly saying that without the [U.S.] pressure, there was no way that this progress would have happened.” And it is not just Egyptian liberals who hold this view. Muslim Brotherhood members have spoken about the benefits of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion, as well.

This sentiment exists elsewhere in the region…