Fouad Ajami strikes again

Ajami is one of the "truth-tellers," as he calls the authors of the UNDP Arab Human Development Reports. He pulls no punches. Must read if you're interested in US policy i the Arab world.

clipped from online.wsj.com Autocracy and the Decline of the Arabs The Arab world is plagued by despots. But don’t expect the U.N. to give President Bush any credit for challenging this order. We are now in the midst of one of those periodic autopsies of the Arab condition. The trigger is the publication last month of the Arab Human Development Report 2009, the fifth of a series of reports by the by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on the state of the contemporary Arab world. The first of these reports, published in 2002, was treated with deference. A group of Arab truth-tellers, it was believed, had broken with the evasions and the apologetics to tell of the sordid condition of Arab society—the autocratic political culture, the economic stagnation, the cultural decay. Little has altered in the years separating the first of these reports from the most recent. It is no mystery, this sorrowful decline of the Arabs. They have invested their hopes in states, and the states have failed