A New Refrain in a Very Old Song

It's nice to see that the Secretary of State can be bothered to leave the country this week. Especially for something as important as a trip to North Africa.
Reuters says:
"Washington says all three nations have provided exemplary support to the U.S.-led "war on terrorism" launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. However, their human rights records are checkered at best in dealing with militant Islamists at home...
...The two countries reflect the dilemma Washington faces in the Middle East as a whole -- whether to judge governments on their human rights and democratic credentials or to give priority to cooperation against religious militancy."
The President, during his Nov. 6 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, stated that "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." However, I expect little change. While it's important that the Bush administration would love to see parallel moves on both the human rights front as well as in security, for an administration heading into an election year, I'd wager they'll settle for security, regarless of how much the Secretary of State "wags his finger."
Should the President make a greater case for increased personal freedoms in Muslim autocracies? I'd like to think I'd get a resounding "Sure!" from any crowd. However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the administration is happy to go on tilling the rhetorical soil of increased liberalization until it feels it can truly hold up the model of Iraq. As Dan Drezner recently indicated, it's hard to tell when, or if, we'll have that example at our disposal. Though the administration seems to understand that the War on Terror can't be won without real change in the entire Islamic world, it apprears that it is more than prepared to continue to give most of the nations on our "watch list" a pass for the foreseeable future. Despite the President's rhetoric, the governments that were "better than Soviet-Satellites" will remain "better than Islamist bastions" at least until Iraq shows large, quantifiable steps forward.

As a wise man once said,
"California sunlight, sweet calcutta rain
Honolulu starbright--the song remains the same. ooh! ooh!
Here we go!"

Here we go, indeed.