ABSTRACT
In the months and years since September 11, 2001, the idea that the United States should promote democracy more actively in the Arab world has become commonplace. Although democratization and reform in the Arab world are indisputably desirable, the US government is going about it in the wrong way. The US strategy, as it has been executed, is based on supporting traditional liberal elites who support liberal ideals as they are articulated in the West. Greater openness and tolerance in the Middle East would indeed serve US interests. How US leaders try to achieve these outcomes, though, must change in major ways from past practices. If the stakes were lower, the United States could afford the luxury of taking an easier and less effective approach to political change in the Arab world. When nationalist revolutions swept the Arab world in the 1950s, those revolutions were a repudiation of that weakness.
