Just Out: Freedom Fighters:

On Sunday, when President Bush delivers a speech trumpeting what he calls his "freedom agenda" from Abu Dhabi, absent from the presidential entourage will be many of the policy warriors who fought within the State Department for the president's initiative to spread democracy in the Middle East. Over the past year and a half, officials charged with implementing the president's pro-democracy agenda have slowly trickled out of Foggy Bottom, as well as from other government offices, amidst increasing resistance to their efforts. Foremost among them was the vice president's daughter Elizabeth Cheney, who never returned to her post as a senior State Department official after going on maternity leave in the summer of 2006.

One of the most recent to leave was David Denehy, who left his job as a senior advisor to the State Department's Iran democracy program in October. "My decision to leave the administration is due, in part, to my belief that I am better able to serve the goals of the President's Freedom Agenda from outside of government," Denehy wrote in an email notifying friends of his impending departure. His words were telling, signaling that democracy-promotion advocates have lost confidence in their efforts to make their initiative a top priority within the U.S. government.

The centerpiece of this effort was the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), created in 2002 to fund reformers throughout the region. Scott Carpenter, a former top aide to Elizabeth Cheney who left his State Department post of deputy assistant secretary in August, says the MEPI was created as a "viral" force inside the agency and was deliberately placed within the Near East division, which hawks have long viewed as stronghold of status quo-ism. "The innovation of the Bush administration," he says, "was to try to create a bureaucratic counterweight to business as usual, within the Near East regional bureau." [...]

By the time Elizabeth Cheney, then principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, left the State Department to have her fifth child in 2006, Carpenter and Denehy found themselves working in an agency increasingly unreceptive, if not hostile, to their agenda. For a time, they took pains to be elusive about when exactly their well-connected boss would return. "When we lost Liz, that was a big loss," Carpenter says. "We wanted to be vague" about if she was coming back. Despite the president's ideological sympathies, their efforts met increasing resistance, especially after they lost their heavyweight. (Cheney is reportedly serving as a foreign-policy advisor to Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson.) "When Liz Cheney was at the Near East bureau, she battled the bureaucracy very hard to take a stronger view on democracy," says Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House. "I was not in the meetings, but from the outside we were impressed—because she was connected to the [Office of the Vice President], people listened to her, and MEPI got a big push and had a lot of forward movement." [...]

As for Carpenter, on Sunday he'll be watching the president's speech intently—and this time from the sidelines. Despite the administration's last-ditch shove to resurrect the democracy push, he says, the president's freedom agenda remains far from realized. "The Bush administration stated as its policy objective to push this [pro-democracy agenda] first and keep it first," he says. "And I have to say, by the end of the administration, it is very difficult to maintain that it has."

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Update: A U.S. diplomat comments, "Good article and pretty fair – the problem is that it makes it sound like the career State Department is somehow the ones blocking the march towards democracy in NEA whereas it is, as you say 'to get what we need to get, we have to get it from undemocratic leaders.' The [neoconservatives] believed in democracy as long as it was democracy as defined by them – Hamas which was democratically elected was beyond the pale. Democratic elections in Egypt would have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. And these democrophiles were also cheering the brutal bombing of Lebanon by Israel which really set back that fragile country. But if your core issues are opposing Al-Qa’ida and containing Iran, you don’t need fragile, tempestuous democracies, you need the usual local tyrants we have been dealing with for decades."

Posted by Laura at January 11, 2008 07:49 PM