In the wake of September 11th, 2001, president George W Bush said it was time to "shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East". Bush admitted that "in the past we have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability". Propping up dictators "merely bought time. While problems festered, ideologies of violence took hold," he noted, writes Lara Marlowe
After half a century of US blunders helped to make the Middle East the world's principal exporter of terrorism, Mr Bush concluded that the solution was to flood the Arab and Islamic world with democracy.
Better late than never, one is tempted to say. But democracy, as the Mexican writer Octavio Paz observed, is not Nescafé; you don't simply add water and stir. Fostering democracy in such an explosive region is a perilous undertaking.
Washington has overthrown one dictatorship at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, without any sign of an end to the bloodshed. Several other Arab regimes have been shaken, but if they fall, there is no guarantee that what follows will be better.
"This is a high-risk process," says the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, "like transporting nitroglycerine." Earlier this month, the US assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried visited Paris in an attempt to win French support for what he called "the US-European imperative to support democratic reform in the Middle East".
Mr Fried, like his boss, the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, is an eastern bloc specialist. They believe that Arab Muslims will rally to US-style democracy the way the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians did. Don't worry about the vast cultural and historical differences between the two regions: democracy is "as natural as the marketplace", Mr Fried said in a speech at the US embassy.
Is it possible to bomb democracy into being in Iraq? If present plans are carried out, Iraqis will have voted four times by early next year. But elections alone do not a democracy make; it must exist in the framework of the rule of law, and there is no rule of law in Iraq.
By promoting a sectarian system of government in Iraq, where all positions are based on quotas for Sunni, Kurds and Shia, the US is creating a mutilated democracy and favouring the emergence of an Iranian-style Islamic republic run by the majority Shia.
Already, shops selling alcohol are burned down. Women who do not wear the veil are attacked. In an article entitled "Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic" published by the New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador, quotes the head of Iranian intelligence in Erbil saying: "Throughout Iraq, the people we supported are in power."
US double-standards are as flagrant as ever. The election of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June was dismissed as a sham, because a clerical council vetted candidates. But Mr Bush congratulated the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak when he was elected for a fifth term, saying the fact that other candidates - vetted by Mr Mubarak's party - were allowed to stand at all was "a beginning". America's aggressive pro-democracy stance has some positive effects. It accelerated the Syrian departure from Lebanon, and has given leeway to the Kifaya ("Enough") opposition to Mr Mubarak. But Syria and Lebanon are lurching through a period of uncertainty, and Washington is believed to be negotiating change within Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime rather than risk real democracy.
The US predicted democracy would flower in the Arab world after Kuwait was liberated in 1991. Fourteen years later, Kuwait finally gave women the right to vote. According to a Kuwaiti diplomat: "The Americans told the emir that until women were enfranchised, there would be no more high-level contacts, and the crown prince's visit to Washington would be cancelled." What if George W Bush told the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon: "No more high-level contacts until you stop colonising the West Bank"? Mr Bush's belief that democratic Arab governments would embrace Israel is based on a book by right-wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. In The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, Sharansky argues that Palestinian anger is fabricated by Arab rulers eager to cling to power, and that Palestinians must become democrats before Israel can make peace.
If the US wanted to create a democratic Palestine, the first thing it would do would be to give president Mahmoud Abbas a realistic prospect of achieving an equitable peace settlement. Instead, Mr Sharon, echoed by US officials, now says the Palestinians must first pass the test of creating "democratic institutions" in Gaza. In other words, to regain the West Bank, which is theirs by international law, the Palestinians must meet US and Israeli standards of "democracy".
The US failure to work seriously for a just solution to the Palestinian problem is its biggest handicap in convincing Arab Muslims that it seeks democracy across the region. Until or unless that credibility gap is closed, Washington will not be trusted by the Arab democrats and reformers it claims it wants to help.