Governments in most of the Middle East have stifled their citizens. We must offer a better choice for the people.

As presidential primary season begins and as we continue to have trouble in Iraq, it will be easy to lose sight of our long-term goals in and for the Middle East.

Sniping – both political and the armed variety – may bog us down in the difficult details of policy and warfare. So it will be worthwhile to keep – and occasionally reread – a speech President Bush gave Nov. 6.

On the whole, that speech was an excellent description of our interests and hopes in the Arab world and its nearby neighborhood. Although short on details, Bush’s talk offered a worthy vision of what that world could become and why it’s in America’s interests to help.

I’ve been to the Middle East only twice – most recently last year. But even that limited contact has helped me understand the richness of the culture and the huge potential of people there who have lived under oppressive regimes for decades. Governments in most of the Middle East have stifled their citizens, kept many of them in ignorance and poverty and encouraged radical religious responses that have grown into terrorism.

What I’ve come to think of as the Bush Doctrine – the extension of freedom and democracy into this destructive darkness – may not be a complete answer to how to heal the sickness in the Middle East, but it has the advantage of reasonable clarity and cohesiveness. Beyond that, in the Nov. 6 speech Bush frankly acknowledged that the American approach to the Arab world has been faulty for decades.

“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe,” Bush said. It was a remarkable – and long overdue – admission. It is, of course, possible to make a good case that this administration also has engaged in “excusing and accommodating” regimes that crush their people, but the speech may be a sign that the president recognizes it’s time for a new approach.

Even beyond the acknowledgement that playing footsy with tyrants is no way to promote freedom, the Bush speech also named one of the biggest problems in Middle East – the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“In Iran,” Bush said, “the demand for democracy is strong and broad, as we saw last month when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Tehran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people or lose its last claim to legitimacy.”

Western intelligence authorities are nearly unanimous in their belief that Iran’s ruling theocracy is a major sponsor of global terrorism. And it has this done dirty work against the wishes of its people.

As author and political analyst Michael A. Ledeen reports in the newly updated edition of his book, “The War Against the Terror Masters,” “The Islamic regime in Tehran has long since lost any semblance of popular support, and it has maintained power only through the systematic use of terror against its people.” He notes that more than two decades “of theocracy have produced ruin and misery.”

If Bush’s analysis is reasonably accurate – and it is – the question is what we should do. In that speech, Bush didn’t offer much of a road map for how to proceed. On this point, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, was on target in a recent essay.

“I think that the president – and many of his advisers – find it easy to embrace democracy but not the means to get there,” Zakaria wrote. Promoting democracy, as Zakaria noted, requires “the building of strong political institutions, a market economy and a civil society.”

Beyond that, America and the West must be careful not to be seen as a bully imposing Western-style democracy on others. Freedom in the Middle East may well result in forms of governance that look quite different from America’s political structures. And for sure we must not be seen as promoting democracy merely to secure our rights to exploit natural resources in the Middle East or to guarantee corporate profits.

Access to oil and markets can be beneficial results of promoting democracy but they must not be the primary reason for such a policy. Rather, the policy must be rooted in the idea that freedom should be the birthright of everyone and that America can be one of freedom’s promoters and defenders. The Bush speech gets much of this right. It’s a standard to which we should hold him when he feels pressured to cut our losses and disengage from the Middle East.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.

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