In a faded Washington mansion with a grand circular staircase, the formerly elegant ballroom is now cluttered with desks and telephones. The lines were busy late last year with calls to Ukraine. Now they are connected to dissidents and reformers in Lebanon, Egypt and other countries in the Middle East where democracy is stirring.

This is the headquarters of Freedom House, a little known but increasingly effective outpost of American soft power. When Ukraine went to the polls last November, Freedom House quietly drafted in election observers, ran exit polls that exposed the corrupt government’s ballot rigging and advised the young activists of the Orange revolution on the art of pamphleteering and street protest.

Its office in Kyrgyzstan, another former Soviet republic, had its power cut last month because it was printing the only independent newspapers and election leaflets for opponents of the government during the country’s polls. The American embassy quickly stepped in to provide two generators.

Freedom House’s new target is its most ambitious yet: the Middle East, where a display of people power in Lebanon has drawn the world’s attention to a phenomenon few thought possible — the stirrings of democracy in a region notorious for its tyrants, despots, religious bigots and obscurantist royal families.

It is too soon to say that there is a domino effect under way in the Middle East as powerful as the one that ended the Soviet Union 13 years ago. But the recent elections in Iraq, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, and now President Hosni Mubarak’s first significant move towards Egyptian political reform in decades — under pressure from Washington he is allowing other candidates to challenge him in a presidential election — are indicators of a political shift.

So, too, is the stunning resignation of Lebanon’s government and the street protests in Beirut demanding free and fair parliamentary elections this spring and an end to Syrian occupation following the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

For both the Arabs and the Americans, this dramatic political awakening offers a difficult paradox.

Sixteen months ago Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, described Paul Wolfowitz, the American deputy secretary of defence, as a “filthy son of a harlot of Zion” and hoped for the early death of “people like him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and Palestine”.

Yet it is Jumblatt who, as demonstrators took to the streets around him, galvanised the world’s attention by publicly recognising the role of these hated Americans as a catalyst for democratic reform. “It’s strange for me to say it,” he told The Washington Post last month in an interview that has reverberated around the world, “but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.”

He went on: “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8m of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.” For all that Iraq remains in dangerous turmoil, Jumblatt’s remarks lent iconic status. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iraqi election is now a benchmark from which there can be no turning back — just as President George W Bush’s neoconservative allies had predicted.

The White House is celebrating this astounding political vindication with a restraint that was markedly absent from its handling of Iraq. For Bush faces the paradox that he would trample such democratic stirrings at birth if he were to claim to be the father of them.

Washington won the open and lasting plaudits of nations liberated in the collapse of the Soviet empire; but in Arab countries America remains, if not the Great Satan anathematised by the Iranian mullahs, then certainly a cause of fear and resentment. No budding Arab democrat wants to be publicly associated with Israel’s friend (or, if they are Egyptian or Saudi, with the friend of their own undemocratic ruler). This need to deny America its celebration was demonstrated by Michel Nawfal, a respected Lebanese political journalist, with his analysis of the Iraqi election.

“Saddam Hussein’s style of regime and practices furnished the West with the justifications to invade and enforce a regime change,” he said, “and when Iraqis participated in the elections in Iraq, despite the dangers and threats from insurgents, they did so out of personal choice and not as a result of American choice or demand.