While Americans don their green today, the Bush administration is engaging in its favorite St. Patrick’s Day tradition: incurring the ire of the Arab lands. Last March it was the invasion of Iraq – not altogether well-received in the Arab world. This year the administration has created a fresh furor in the region with its “Greater Middle East Initiative” (GME): a plan to bring democracy and enterprise to every country from Morocco to Afghanistan. Or as a headline in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat glowingly described it, a “U.S. Working Paper for G8 Sherpas”.

Yes, the GME initiative has instantly garnered the “imperialist” label. Egypt’s President Mubarak immediately condemned the American plan, declaring “All peoples by their nature reject whoever tries to impose ideas on them.” One Al-Hayat writer put it even more bluntly, denouncing “the imperial tendency” of “spreading democracy in the Middle East as a way to take over the region.” Nor has the backlash been limited to the Arab world. Our European allies—shockingly—have been cool to the plan as well, with one EU diplomat predicting it would precipitate a “clash of civilizations.”

Ballyhoo aside, a distinction needs to be drawn between imperialism and modernization, too often conflated in the West and elsewhere. Ireland herself provides an instructive example. In the 1600s Oliver Cromwell subjugated the Emerald Isle, massacring thousands of Irish civilians and confiscating most of their landholdings. In the ensuing centuries, the Irish people were subjected to harshly discriminatory anti-Catholic laws. That was imperialism. In the past few decades, the European Union’s development grants to Ireland have helped transform the nation into a prosperous, open economy with a highly-educated workforce and an impressive growth rate. That is modernization.

And there can be little doubt the Arab world is in need of modernization. As the UN’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) notes, the region is plagued by high unemployment, low growth, pervasive illiteracy and a dearth of opportunity for women. The GME initiative challenges the G8 countries to fund programs that would address these gaps.

The problem is, many in the US and other Western countries are wary of such modernizing projects, fearing that political and economic reforms amount to “Westernization,” to imposing our culture on others. Granted, democracy and sustained economic growth did arrive earlier in North America and Western Europe than in other parts of the world. But Western societies have also adopted innovations that originated elsewhere, including from the Middle East—everything from Algebra to agriculture. Few would claim that the spread of farming and the quadratic equation represents “Mesopotamiazation.” Why should democracy and mass literacy be any less universally applicable? Indeed, the 2003 AHDR found that Arabs are more likely to agree with the statement “democracy is better than any other form of government” than anyone else in the world.

Nonetheless, is it wise to impose modernization from outside? Surely not, but the plan can hardly be accused of imposing anything. Rather, the G8 programs would provide funds and technical assistance to Arab men and women working to create change internally: everything from journalism scholarships to micro-enterprise loans; from election monitors, to grants to pro-democracy NGOs and academic centers for women.

The plan’s Achilles heal is, as one Arab diplomat put it, “the messenger.” Between Bush’s over-zealous pursuit of illusory weapons in Iraq, and his under-zealous pursuit of a peaceful settlement in Israel, any plan he proposes for the Middle East is bound to be regarded suspiciously. The damage to our reputation wrought by the Iraq war will be hard to fix, but the president must make a credible effort to get Sharon and the Palestinian Authority back to the negotiating table. Until he does, the GME initiative will not go far.

But in itself, the GME plan embodies the very strategy that Bush’s critics (with whom I am proud to associate) have been calling on the president to adopt all along. State Department officials have been discussing the plan with ministers from Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Bahrain and the plan will be presented at the G8 summit in June for discussion with Canada, Britain, Russia, Japan—even France and Germany! The administration must be held accountable to ensure that consultation is genuine, but so far the prospects for multilateralism look good. And it should warm peace-loving hearts to see the administration promoting democracy by creating opportunities for Arab reformers, instead of mounting invasions.

I am certainly not one to pass up an opportunity to disparage the Dissembler-in-Chief. But there are, after all, so many of those opportunities already. This time, the accusations of hegemonic designs just sound silly.

Eoghan W. Stafford ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.