Michael Duffy
March 15, 2005

Michael Duffy is TIME's Washington Bureau chief and has been at the center of the magazine's coverage of politics and presidents for ten years. (Read Michael Duffy's bio)

Q: In his 2005 inaugural address, the president told the world: "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Is there evidence that some of the recent pro-democratic developments in the Middle East an outgrowth of the U.S. foreign policy? If so, to what extent has American influence played a role? Do some of these movements appear to have "staying power"?

There's no question that elections in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are having repurcussions across the region -- but whether the U.S. is the catalyst is really difficult to know. Hosni Mubarak is talking about multi-party presidential elections in Egypt. Regional councils are being elected over a six-week period in Saudi Arabia. And elections are at least set for May in Lebanon. Some of these efforts have little or nothing to do with the U.S.. Some are being taken by the ruling powers to either buy time or ward further democratization off completely. And by U.S. standards, these are baby steps toward democracy. (Women still cannot vote in Saudi Arabia.) But they are steps in the right direction.

Will they last? No one can say. President Bush recently called the changes in the week a "generational committment," meaning they could take decades. He urged Americans to be patient through good headlines and bad headlines from the region. Regardless of how fast things happen, Bush has clearly decided that he wants to get -- and stay - on the right side of the historical drift.

Q: Free elections in the Middle East may reveal strong support for some Islamist groups, such as the militant Hezbollah, in the region. These groups often are strongly anti-American and many of the groups oppose political participation by women. How concerned is the administration about the possibility that the elections the U.S. advocates could end up validating factions the U.S. has resisted in the past? Are they ready to work with the Islamists?

They don't have much choice. Democracy in the Middle East is a little like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what you might get. Would the US prefer perfectly-civil political parties, like those we've grown accustomed to, sprouting up all over the Middle East? Sure. Is it going to get them? No. So from Iraq to Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, it must reconcile itself to dealing with groups whose goals and methods it opposes as political partners. In Lebanon, that means Hezbollah. In the West Bank and Gaza, that probably means Hamas. As these groups gain popular power, Washington believes they will be forced to act more responsibly -- or risk losing that power.

In this respect, the US is trying to take the long view, saying that the sooner the people of the region get to pick their own leaders, the sooner they will gain the experience to make wise choices. it is not a very comfortable situation for Washington, but the Bush team believes that anything that moves the region toward pluralism and away from hereditary regimes will be in the long term interest of the U.S.. This is a really interesting leap that the US is now making in the region -- slowly but surely loosening its embrace of these oligarchies -- and imagining a new set of leaders instead.

Q: John Bolton, the newly-nominated U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has been a harsh critic of the world body. Are there any indications of the kind of reception he can expect when he arrives at the Secretariat Building after being confirmed?

I'm betting against a East Side ticker-tape parade. But I tend to think Bolton will be good for the U.N. and, in any case, will be a lot of fun to watch, too. It's hard to imagine, after the oil for food scandal and the U.N.'s retreat from Baghdad, that things could get much worse for the U.N.'s reputation. And Bolton may surprise us. In general, appointees who have been on the record opposing agencies and institutions which they are chosen to run almost always come in and work harder at saving and reforming those places than anyone ever imagined. He will have a truckload of clout with a Republican Congress that's hostile to the U.N.; he will spend a lot of time keeping an eye on Iran and North Korea -- two places the U.S. is severaly limited in its ability to affect events. Bolton seems to me to be another indication Condi Rice's great skill -- Bolton is a hardliner's hardliner and so his appointment buys her a lot of swat with that faction in the Bush team. At the same time, his tendency to make strident and sometimes unhelpful statements may even give her room to caper and cut deals short of his more hardline position.

Q: American media often are criticized for looking at foreign news through western eyes. What does TIME magazine do to ensure that its Middle East reporting is not only factually accurate but also culturally perceptive? How familiar with the region are your reporters? What makes them particularly suited to analyze developments in such a complicated region?

We have reporters in Damascus and Beirut and Cairo and Amman and Riyadh as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories. These reporters live and breathe what goes on in their backyards, and if we do our jobs right, our stories reflect what they are hearing and seeing every day. What makes Middle Eastern stories tricky is that there are so many moving parts, so many players and the countries are so closely knit and integrated (despite the many ancient rivalries and hatreds) that tiny changes in one place or among one faction can have implications across the entire region. That makes every development harder to gauge than it might be in some other part of the world -- and it makes progress harder to notch. There have been so many moments in recent years when there has seemed a chance for peace: what its hardest for us to know as Americans is whether long-resistent appetites for change are finally changing after a generation of violence.