ABSTRACT
In the years between 2002 and 2006, the United States suddenly embraced an ambitious project to promote democratization and political reform in the Arab world. The effort was startling for the rhetoric it produced and for the brashness of the vision. Yet a long-term look at American policy leaves a less revolutionary impression of the period. Prior to 2002, the US had experimented with political reform on the edges of a policy that was more centrally focused on security and economic issues. The Bush administration brought a far more robust spirit to the enterprise, but its policies in implementation never matched its rhetoric and ultimately were scaled back to resemble simply a more garrulous version of what had come before. While the Bush administration was willing to question past assumptions that had pushed democracy out to the margins of US policy, the answers it developed to those questions proved to be familiar ones.
