The Frame Game, continued

Tyler Marshall, writing in the LA Times, gives an alternative anti-administration spin. The key here is to portray democracy as dangerous. He writes:

WASHINGTON — Over 60 dramatic hours ending Monday, events in the Middle East highlighted both the hopes and risks of change in the region as the Bush administration pursues its agenda of reform.

He notes the administration's spin:

Within the administration, the developments were quietly hailed as signals that the president's vision to spread democracy in the Middle East was not naïve and misguided, as critics had said, but an idea Arabs genuinely wanted to embrace.

But immediately follows it with caveats:

Despite this windfall of good news, however, Middle East specialists inside and outside the administration remained cautious.

"I've been working on the Middle East too long to be crowing from the rooftops that we've won," a senior State Department official said.

He then cites recent violent events in the region, statements from State Department officials, Carter administration officials, and predicts the political expression of a wave of anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East.

He predicts that free elections in Lebanon would empower Hezbollah, the radical Shiite organization, and fears that in Egypt elections would bring the banned Muslim Brotherhood to power.

He reiterates the old canard that US support for dictators in the past and our support for Israel has made us universally hated throughout the Middle East.

Support for stable, yet authoritarian regimes in the region — the hallmark of U.S. policy for much of the past generation — has produced a contempt for America that today drives Islamic terrorist groups....

He continues:

U.S. policymakers already have had a hint of what free elections can produce in a region where America's image is poor and its agenda often viewed as a Zionist-led conspiracy to subjugate Muslim people. January's election in Iraq produced an Islamic scholar with past ties to Iran as the front-runner to lead a transitional government in Baghdad.

So the US is wrong for supporting stable authoritarian governments in the past and also is wrong for supporting democratization movements in the present. Bush just can't win.

Read the whole thing here:

The lines of attack are becoming clear. Deny Bush any credit for positive developments in the Middle East, attributing them instead to indigenous forces [as in the Boston Globe piece], or recognize a strong role for the White House but portray it as feckless and dangerous and likely to make the situation worse.

To be fair Marshall allows the administration, at the end of his piece, to respond to the criticisms. This is what they said:

"The theory [behind Bush's democratization policy] has always been that if this were to work, it wouldn't be exclusively because we were standing at the top … hectoring people, but because there would be pressure from within and pressure from below in these societies."

Sounds about right to me.