The “Middle East Partnership Initiative” (MEPI) is a US-led agenda for reforming states and societies in the Middle East along neoliberal lines. Established by the Bush administration in 2002, this program follows a political rationality of soft reforms through enhancement of citizen-entrepreneurship, women’s leadership and capacity building of civil society organizations, as means to uproot “terrorism” and spread “democracy”. The MEPI has so far monitored a wide range of “partnership” programs-- based in institutional settings in Washington, DC-- and raised funds to support the creation of networks of NGOs and civil society organizations and provide training and business opportunities for women. In this project, civil society, women’s leadership, and private interest seem to hold together in perfect harmony and are directed toward spreading democracy and freedom in the Middle East. The questions remain: first, what are the assumed connections among these three levels of social engineering and political intervention? Second, what are the logics and truths informing this emphasis on gender and women’s empowerment in relation to the goals of spreading democracy in the Middle East? I consider the MEPI as a technology of power aiming to create legitimacy for the unpopular US “war on terror,” through social engineering, monitoring of civil society and indirect political intervention. My paper will first discuss the grounding of the MEPI in liberal notions of freedom and normative definitions of civil society. Second, I will show the elective and paternalist grounds of the discourse of women’s empowerment and identify the ways in which the MEPI has created new subjects while reinventing the “missing” connections between civil society, private interest, women’s rights, and political authority in the Middle East. Third, I will discuss the tensions between a discourse of democratization, which would require making the state accountable to its own people, and the needs to support authoritarian governments that would contain the growing dissatisfaction about the very American policies in the region. I will conclude with an assessment of the MEPI in light of other regional forums led by NGOs, state professionals, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals across the region.