I agree with you, Andy. And until recently I’ve assumed that the more naive parts of our democratization project were rapidly being abandoned. But apparently, it’s not necessarily so. As I noted a couple days ago, both parties–and particularly the Democrats–seem to have elements not only pushing democratization, but even advocating an expansion of our democratization policy to include groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. I was shocked the other day to see that the DLC-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute is pushing this idea.

We’ve been so focused on Iraq that we haven’t paid attention to what the Democrats plan to do about the Middle East as a whole. Given the depth of Democratic antipathy to the president’s democratization policy, I’d assumed they were going realist. Actually, however, the Dems may adopt a “non-muscular” version of democratization, in which they try to buy off Islamism by giving (temporarily) unarmed branches of the movement democratic legitimacy. As I see it, this would be the worst of both worlds–the current administration’s flawed democratization policy, without the military leverage.