Hassan Fattah's NYT piece on the stalled momentum towards Arab democracy which ran while I was away was fine, I thought. A bit dated, maybe - this stalled momentum has been clear for a long time - but fine. Good point about how Arab rulers have taken Bush's measure and concluded that they have nothing to fear from him (I had the same thought as Jai Singh at the excellent new Foreign Policy blog - rather than waiting Bush out, their real concern should be that Bush's successor actually cares about democratic reform in the region and will be more effective, not less, at pushing for it).
Anyway, the part that attracted my attention was the bit on Jordan. As I anticipated in the piece I did for the Arab Reform Bulletin last November, the National Agenda has disappeared and Jordan's reformers find themselves out of the loop and out of spirits:
"For some reason, it was not publicized, it was not advertised, and it's got into the hands of very few people," said Taher al-Masri, a member of the drafting committee and, for a brief time, prime minister of Jordan. "We went, we took a picture, and that was it," he said of the ceremony.
The effort toward what was called the National Agenda set off a contentious battle between Jordan's elite Western-educated reformers, who were accused of debating issues behind closed doors, and entrenched forces in the Parliament and Senate, who sought to have greater say in the program.
Advocates like Marwan Muasher and others were quickly tainted, perceived as serving an American agenda rather than seeking reform.
Jordan's elected Parliament sought to stymie any laws presented out of the effort, dismissing them as an effort aimed at appeasing the West, while the Senate, appointed by the king and comprising predominantly old-guard powers, also worked to preserve its hold.
Meanwhile, the changes in government only served to interrupt the reform dialogue.
...
"For some reason, the system seems to cave in to the first signs of resistance, then it follows with policies of appeasement, and the reformers are abandoned," said Mustafa Hamarneh, a committee member and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Jordan. "The national agenda was going to be a road map to reform in the country, but it suddenly disappeared off the radar screen. It is no longer part of the official discourse."
Hamarneh has, I hear, quit Jordan TV after the recent changes in favor of the old conservatives which I wrote about a few weeks ago - demonstrating the setbacks in the media sector just as in the political. People like Hamarneh and Muasher and Masri made a lot of mistakes in the Agenda process, no doubt about it, but they were trying to push real political reform. It's a very telling sign that they are all now so openly disenchanted.
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