LADY W:

Hillary Clinton Echoes the Bush Doctrine: The secretary is right about the Mideast's troubled autocrats. Too bad her boss decided to cast his lot with them. (FOUAD AJAMI , 1/19/11, WSJ)

Mr. Obama had come into office with a belief that he knew and understood the Islamic world. He was proud that Islam was a strand in his identity. He was sure that the policy of his predecessor had antagonized Islam. President George W. Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" was not given the grace of a decent burial. "Ideology is so yesterday," Secretary Clinton proudly proclaimed in early 2009. Realpolitik was to be the order of the day.

The Bush diplomacy had declared an open ideological assault against the Iranian theocracy. Mr. Obama would offer that regime an olive branch and a promise of engagement. Syria had been pushed out of Lebanon and viewed as a renegade regime that had done its best to frustrate the American war in Iraq. The Obama diplomacy would offer the rulers in Damascus diplomatic rehabilitation.

Thus the word went forth to the despots in the region that the American campaign on behalf of liberty that Mr. Bush had launched in 2003 had been called off. A new Iraqi democracy, midwifed by American power, was fighting for its life. The Obama administration would keep Iraq at arm's length.

This break of faith with democracy was put on cruel display in the summer of 2009, when the Iranians rose in revolt against their rulers. True, American diplomacy was not likely to alter the raw balance of power between the regime and its democratic oppositionists. But the timidity of American power, and the refusal of the Obama administration to embrace the cause of the opposition, must be reckoned one of American foreign policy's great moral embarrassments. [...]

For a fleeting moment in Qatar, George W. Bush seemed to make a furtive return to the diplomatic arena. He was there, reincarnated in the person of Hillary Clinton, bearing that quintessential American message that our country cannot be indifferent to the internal arrangements of foreign lands. The Arab world presents a great strategic and moral challenge. These are states with a broken compact between rulers and ruled. The rulers produce the very terror and rage they propose to hold back. The oppositionists, meanwhile, are a great, troubling unknown.