...Such decades-old rhetoric is as empty and exhausted as the nationalism and socialism on which the Egyptian and Syrian regimes are based. Yet it has been swallowed and retailed at face value by some European diplomats and Democratic critics of the Bush administration. Their resistance may in part be motivated by election-year partisanship or lingering transatlantic tensions, but it also demonstrates that thinking about the Middle East has ossified outside as well as inside the region. Of course Mr. Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt under emergency law for 23 years, is opposed to the democratization policy -- and would be regardless of how it was put forward, or whether or not peace had arrived between Arabs and Israelis. Far from being an argument against the administration's effort to organize a push for reform by the Group of Eight industrial countries, NATO and the European Union, such obstructionism should make clear why the effort is needed. Unless change is encouraged by the United States and Europe, it will be blocked indefinitely by the strongmen, most of whom depend on Western aid and alliances...

...Yet the Bush administration will not encourage transformation of the Middle East until it breaks with old-style rulers and old ways of thinking. Until it is prepared to use its considerable leverage with allies such as Mr. Mubarak to promote political freedom, as opposed to stability, its democracy initiative will lack credibility.