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The pressing question is what those outside the Middle East can do if they want to see reform spread across the region They say that if failure is an orphan, then success has many fathers – and Egypt’s revolution has proved the truth of that aged wisdom all over again. The latest to file a paternity claim is Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary to George W Bush. Out hawking his new memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld reckons it was Bush’s “freedom agenda” that paved the way for the current revolutionary spirit sweeping the Arab world. “What President Bush has done in Iraq and Afghanistan is to give the people in those countries a chance to have freer political systems and freer economic systems. There’s no question that the example is helpful in the region.” In this, Rumsfeld was a little late to the party. His neoconservative outriders had already been making the case even more forcefully. In the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer took the near-universal admiration for the crowds in Tahrir Square as belated endorsement of the Bush programme. Where once Bush, Tony Blair and the neocons stood alone, now “it seems everyone, even the left, is enthusiastic for Arab democracy”, wrote Krauthammer, adding generously: “Fine. Fellow travellers are welcome.” In Britain Melanie Phillips has expressed astonishment at the sight of progressives backing the Egyptian demands for regime change: hadn’t these same “bien-pensants” denounced the Bush-Blair pursuit of regime change in Iraq? There could only be one explanation for this sudden change of heart: the left opposed the removal of Saddam because he was anti-western, but supported the ejection of Hosni Mubarak because he was pro-western. Er, no. That’s not quite it. Those who cheered last week’s upheaval in Cairo did so because it was a revolution from within, driven entirely by the Egyptian people, and because it was conducted by peaceful means. To put it too mildly, neither of those two conditions applied in Baghdad in 2003. A foreign invasion and an internal, grassroots uprising are not the same thing: it is perfectly possible to oppose one and support the other. Nor can the Bush defenders get away with rewriting the history of the former president’s “freedom agenda”, pursued most vigorously in the first two years of his second term. Those who criticised it did not do so because they believed that Arabs were, in Krauthammer’s words, “uniquely allergic to democracy”. The objection was to a Bush mission fatally tainted by the conquest of Iraq: after the 2003 war, any talk from him of spreading democracy sounded like a threat of invasion. People yearned for freedom, to be sure; they just didn’t believe it was best imposed down the barrel of a gun. What’s more, the “freedom agenda” was always damagingly selective. While Bush urged democracy in, say, Iran, Dick Cheney was lavishing praise on the dictator of Kazakhstan . To those despots who favoured the west Washington showed a blind eye – with Mubarak himself the prime example. Indeed, some of us were arguing in the Guardian in February 2003 that if Bush were serious about spreading democracy to the Middle East, he needn’t go to the trouble of invading Iraq : he could start with Egypt, tying America’s billion-dollar handouts to the country to “democratic performance”, making the cash conditional on Cairo allowing a free press, independent judiciary and real elections. Besides, the Bush team itself didn’t truly believe in the “freedom agenda”. Already cooling on the idea when Mubarak responded to Washington’s pretty tame requests for reform with a middle finger, they gave it up once they saw where democracy could lead: having called for Palestinian elections in 2006, they recoiled at the sight of a Hamas victory. We heard a little less about freedom and democracy after that. All of which makes it a little rich for Rumsfeld and friends to claim that Tahrir Square provides them with delayed vindication. If Bush and Bushism had any role in last week’s upheaval it was negative, continuing to prop up a dictator so hated his people rose up to remove him. Who then has a better paternity claim for the change in Cairo and beyond, besides, of course, the people in the streets themselves? Julian Assange could make a decent case, arguing that it was his WikiLeaks revelations of the Tunisian first couple’s corruption and luxury lifestyle that inspired revolution in that country, sparking the fire that spread next to Egypt and appears to have taken hold in Yemen, Iran and Bahrain , where the same chant that once rang around Tahrir Square has been heard once more: “We demand the fall of the regime.” The most starry-eyed Democrats will want to notch this up as a win for Barack Obama, pointing to his landmark 2009 speech in Cairo and to the simple chronological fact that these revolutions have taken place on his watch. More neutral participants give him credit for making it as clear as he could to a longstanding ally that Mubarak had to go – even over the opposition of some of his own team, including the US special envoy to Egypt. Still, those mixed signals alone ensure that few will recall last Friday’s event as the Obama revolution. More pressing than the allocation of credit is the question of what those outside the region can do if they want to see reform entrenched in Tunisia and Egypt and spread beyond. We know that bombing doesn’t work too well – but nor does love-bombing. If the west, especially the US, backs dissenters too loudly, that allows a regime to cast them as foreign agents and traitors. That was one lesson of the crushed uprising in Iran in the summer of 2009. Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House , told me he’s reached the glum conclusion that if western governments want to help the Iranian opposition, the best they can do is stay well away. “I wouldn’t even touch Iran. All you do is strengthen the regime.” Instead, the west should look to enable, rather than to do, exercising what foreign policy circles think of as soft or smart power, rather than hard, military might. The aim should be to nurture what Niblett calls “the infrastructure of representative government” – the rule of law, a free press and judiciary, parliament – in countries that currently lack the democratic basics. That way, if and when revolution comes, it will have a chance to dig in, take root and survive. Obviously that won’t work with avowedly hostile regimes: Iran and Syria won’t allow foreign teams to come in and start training police or judges. But the west has leverage over the likes of Morocco or Jordan: as allies, they will find it harder to say no. This can’t be a task for the US alone. The European Union can contribute too: after all, soft power is what we’re meant to be good at. Right now, it is the peoples themselves who are rising up and demanding freedom. Our job is to stop backing the tyrants who have oppressed them – and to lend a hand where we can help. That would be a freedom agenda worthy of the name. Egypt Middle East Protest George Bush Donald Rumsfeld Hosni Mubarak Barack Obama United States US foreign policy European Union Jonathan Freedland guardian.co.uk