In 2003, President George W. Bush proclaimed a “forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East”, arguing that experience had taught the US “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty”.
Two years later, Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said in Cairo that for 60 years the US had pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East and had ended up with neither. America, she averred, had learnt its lesson. But two more years on, the freedom agenda that was to transform the Middle East and the Muslim world lies in tatters.
