Obama is surely right to reduce U.S. goals to match the resources he and the American public are willing to commit. And nurturing democracy in the Arab world was always going to be a long and bumpy pursuit. Democracy advocates weren't surprised when the president publicly downgraded their agenda; they had watched U.S. aid shift from civil society programs to security for more than a year. But subtracting high-level attention from the Middle East isn't likely to work. The region reliably produces one crisis after another, whether we give it careful attention or not. The weapons of mass destruction, the civil wars, the terrorists and the oil will still be there.
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