A CENTRAL claim of the Bush administration’s foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism. So what do you do when you get a democratically elected terrorist organisation? Ignore the contradiction. Pretend it doesn’t exist.

In the past few weeks there has been something utterly surreal about the US continuing to allow the Israeli military to pummel Hezbollah, and kill women and children along the way, while insisting that Washington’s purpose is to strengthen the legitimate, democratic government of Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, has been calling desperately for the one thing that the US and Israel have refused: an immediate ceasefire. And Hezbollah, which the US and Britain characterise as a terrorist organisation, is itself an important part of that democratically elected government.

So we must do everything for that democratically elected government except what it asks. We know best what is good for them. Whoever said democracy meant letting the people themselves decide? As Lebanon’s special envoy, Tarek Mitri, told PBS, America’s publicly funded broadcaster, on Tuesday: “You can’t support a government while you’re allowing its country to be ruined.”

Meanwhile, Hamas is not allowed to operate as the democratically elected government of the Palestinians. The Palestinian people spoke. But they got it wrong. They must have been misinformed. They must think again.

Of course there’s a real dilemma here. Just because Hamas and Hezbollah competed and did well in elections, that doesn’t mean you must accept everything they stand for. Both are Janus-faced movements, as was IRA/Sinn Fein. Engaging with Hezbollah-as-Sinn Fein or Hamas-as-Sinn Fein doesn’t mean tolerating the terrorist activities of Hezbollah-as-IRA or Hamas-as-IRA. Up to a point, you can fight the terrorist side while encouraging the political side. In fact, the name of the game is precisely to shift their calculus of self-interest towards peaceful politics, by increasing both the costs of violence and the benefits of participation.

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy. They involve negotiating with terrorists, letting some past wrongs go unpunished and accepting that a movement’s militant rhetoric may lag behind the more pragmatic reality of its position. Everything, in fact, that the US practised in its relations with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which it initially characterised — with reason — as “without any questions, a terrorist group”.

Two diametrically opposite conclusions may be drawn from these first strange fruits of democratisation in the Middle East. One is to say that the whole Bush agenda of supporting democratisation in the Arab and Islamic world was misguided from the start — the product of a naive, missionary-cowboy approach to international politics. It destabilises. It brings terrorists and extremists to power.

The cure is worse than the disease. So let’s get back to seasoned old “realism”. Let’s not try to transform these countries or expect them to be more like us, but take them as they are. Let’s pursue our national interests — security, trade, energy — with whatever allies we can find. Stability comes first.

This is the default position of much European diplomacy. It’s the wisdom of Jacques Chirac. Curiously enough, it’s also where some of the European left ends up — taken there by its opposition to “war for democracy” a la Bush and Blair, or simply by the kneejerk “If Bush is for it, we must be against it”. But following the American debate closely over the past weeks, I find that opposition to the democratisation agenda is also growing inside the US.

There has always been a Republican “realist” position, associated with figures such as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Bush Sr. After Iraq, and this latest imbroglio, it could regain the upper hand in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. It could win out on the other side of American politics too. If one looks at the foreign-policy debate among Democrats, one finds a strong strain of such “realism” — though tagged with “progressive”.

The argument that the US should pull back from this poisonous world, look to its own economic interests and find allies wherever it can appeals to a significant part of the Democratic electorate. For many Democrats, the fact that the current president has identified himself so strongly with the promotion of democracy is another reason for being sceptical about the promotion of democracy. If democratising the Middle East means Iraq, Hezbollah and Hamas, better not try it.

I believe this is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw. In the long run, the growth of liberal democracies is the best hope for the wider Middle East. It’s the best hope of modernisation, which the Arab world desperately needs; of addressing the root causes of Islamist terrorism, inasmuch as they lie in those countries rather than among Muslims living in the West; and of enabling Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Kurds and Turks to live side by side without war. But it will be a long march.

We know from elsewhere that the intermediate period of transition to democracy can be a dangerous time, that it can actually increase the danger of violence, especially in countries divided along ethnic and religious lines, and where you rush to the party-political competition for power without first having a functioning state with well-defined borders, a near-monopoly of force, the rule of law, independent media and a strong civil society. That’s what happened in the former Yugoslavia. That’s what’s been happening, in different ways, in Palestine, in Lebanon and in Iraq. Full, liberal democracy contributes to peace; partial, half-baked democratisation can increase the danger of war.

What we in the community of established liberal democracies should do is not abandon the pursuit of democratisation but refine it. Recognise that only in exceptional circumstances (such as post-war Germany and Japan) do democracies grow from under military occupation, and that the purpose of building democracy does not justify military intervention. Accept that, as the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji wrote in the New York Times, it’s better for people to find their own paths to freedom, and our job is to support them.

Learn from experience that well-defined borders, the rule of law and independent media are as important as an election — and may need to precede it. That along the way you have to negotiate with nasty people and regimes, such as Syria and Iran. And that, in this dirty, complicated world, advocates of armed struggle — terrorists, if you will — can become democratic leaders. Like Menachem Begin. Like Gerry Adams. Like Nelson Mandela.

So let’s not throw out the democratisation baby with the Bush bathwater. There’s a seriously good idea there. It just needs to be a lot better executed, and with patience for the long haul. The right conclusion is strange but true: a little democracy is a dangerous thing — so let’s have more of it.

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