A much-anticipated summit of the Arab League, scheduled to begin today in Tunis, was abruptly put off Saturday, and for a remarkable reason: The kings, emirs and presidents-for-life of the Arab Middle East are unable to agree on a common response to the Bush administration's new policy of promoting democracy in their region. The younger and brighter rulers, knowing the stagnant status quo is unsustainable, are pushing a strategy of co-option, offering halfway, half-baked "reform" programs they have hastily drawn up. The less enlightened insist on sticking to the excuses that Arab dictators have offered the world for the past half-century: a) the first priority must be Israel, and b) foreign tutelage is wrong, except when applied to Israel.
The summit may now never happen; if it does, it will probably settle on a murky mix of these two responses. Either way, critics of the pro-democracy policy -- in Europe, in Washington and inside the Bush administration itself -- will again proclaim that a neocon attempt to "impose" democracy on the Middle East "from the outside" has foundered. That this resistance to elected government comes from a group of kings, emirs and presidents-for-life doesn't seem to trouble the critics. The assumption seems to be that the autocrat
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