At Freedom House, a Washington think tank, they sit down every year and judge 192 sovereign nations according to how "free" they are. They rate each on separate scales, for political rights and civil liberties. Then they average the two to determine whether the nation qualifies as free, partly free or not free.

This year's report was released yesterday. According to Freedom House, which gets its funding from private foundations and public agencies, 86 countries can be characterized as free, 58 as partly free and 48 as not free. There's been a modest shift toward "freedom" since 1981, when 36 per cent of humanity was deemed to be living in freedom, against 41.4 per cent this year.

The survey is primarily an exercise in headline catching, but there is some value in highlighting trends. Electoral democracy and respect for basic liberties represent progress, and it's good to have ways of measuring it. More problematic, of course, is the analysis of who is achieving these freedoms and why.

The emphasis this year -- surprise! -- is on the Muslim world. Muslim-majority countries do not tend to be democracies. Out of 47 such nations, only Mali, in West Africa, is rated free. Three-quarters of them do not even pretend to subscribe to the notion of popular rule.

To its credit, Freedom House acknowledges no inherent incompatibility between Islam and democracy. It cites the tendency of Islamic traditions to prescribe strict religious rules for public life, but it also observes that millions of Muslims around the world live contentedly under democracy. Among other things, it notes a strong correlation between autocracy and the presence of oil.

What it does not delve into, unfortunately, is the relationship of the United States itself to authoritarianism in the Muslim world.

U.S. governments -- and others in the West -- are unconscionably silent about the shackling of freedom in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Reliant on oil, and wishing to retain friends in the volatile Middle East, Washington tolerates repression that it would find unacceptable elsewhere. If U.S. authorities expended as much energy preaching respect for democracy in the Muslim world as they do in Eastern Europe and Latin America, the Muslim world might be a very different place.

It's fine for Laura Bush to take up the cause of Afghan women. But what about Saudi Arabia, where they flog and behead criminals, ban women from driving and won't let anyone vote? Where's the outcry against Egypt's ham-handed persecution of sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim, jailed for seven years after publishing information on election irregularities and religious discrimination?

All right, you might say, but isn't the United States about to take on Saddam Hussein?

Funny about that. There wasn't much concern about freedom in Iraq when Mr. Hussein was battling Iran, archenemy of Washington, during the 1980s.

Then, in the 1990s, the United States made several attempts to engineer his overthrow -- and botched every one. The Iraqi groups it backed were either too weak or too politically suspect to be deemed worthy of sustained support. Now his ouster is on the front burner again -- not because of any passionate commitment to popular rule in the Persian Gulf, but because it fits into the war on terrorism.

Those who struggle against corrupt autocracies in the Muslim world have received far too little support from outside. Should we be surprised when they turn to radical clerics for help?

"I wonder whether we Americans can actually practice what we preach when it comes to the Middle East? Do we actually want elected governments in those countries, when evidence suggests that those governments could well be Islamic Theocracies? The Pakistani leader is promising popular elections in the near future. Is that an encouraging prospect, given the prevalence of angry fundamentalists in that country, and especially coupled with their possession of nuclear weapons? Personally, I don't think we would tolerate a hostile fundamentalist government in Pakistan, freely elected or not. Who would be at risk from such a government? Certainly not only the US, but Canada, Ireland and all other "Crusader" powers. Before we handily accuse the US of nasty meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, maybe some attention needs to be paid to the small concern of continued human survival."