In the recent SoU speech, Obama did offer token support to the Tunisian reform movement (as if 30% of Americans could even find Tunisia on a map), and he delivered that famous address in Cairo trying to repair relations with the Muslim world and encourage democratic changes in repressive Mideast regimes. But now that the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt is at its weakest state in decades, Washington is deathly silent. Heck even this AP article barely explains why Egyptians are protesting to begin with (tired of decades of martial law, repressed expression, huge wealth gap and unemployment, etc.), I suppose feeding more misunderstanding and the stereotype of the angry Arab. Mubarak is a former military officer who has been president since 1981, miraculously winning numerous landslide re-elections similar to the ousted Tunisian despot (and now Mubarak is grooming his son to take over as head of state, yeah very democratic). Maybe part of that is due to his thugs beating down opposition parties, even the deceptively named Muslim Brotherhood, which is mostly non-violent, advocates many Western-friendly reforms, and has nothing to do with extremist Islam. Mubarak outlaws public demonstrations and speaking out against the government too. Yet US leaders have supported this man for years, even selling him weapons and such. Well, after some deal-making Carter got Egypt to recognize Israel, and they do control the Suez Canal after all, so we have to buddy up to them, no matter what type of ruler they have.
America claims that it opposes tyranny, and we supposedly stood by the Iranian anti-government protests a few years ago, which is pretty much the same situation as Egypt except that their government is Islamic and pursuing nukes. We supported Kosovo against Serbia, and Bush even recognized Kosovo's independence a few years ago, much to the dismay of Serbia and Russia - diplomatic ties with those nations are much more critical than with Kosovo/Albania. Then recently a European report concluded that the current Kosovo regime is led by criminals. So we go out of our way to bomb and kill hundreds of Serbs to ostensibly defend the human rights of Kosovar Albanians, then legitimized the state of Kosovo, only to watch as a criminal regime develops. And yet we also tolerate regimes in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt that routinely commit abuses? How can we expect anyone to take our foreign policy seriously?
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More on Egypt: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/
"If there is a democratic revolution, US-Egyptian relationships are in for a world of trouble... There will be some anti-US sentiment among the protesters because they believe the US has been trying to prop up the regime until the last moment."
Or is the US (irrationally) scared "that democracy would 'open up the flood gates' to Islamic revolution"?
-BBC
From Nobel laureate and Egyptian opposition leader Mohammed El-Baradei:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/
"If you would like to know why the United States does not have credibility in the Middle East, [our handling of Egypt over the years] is precisely the answer... You reaffirmed their belief that you are applying a double standard for your friends, and siding with an authoritarian regime just because you think it represents your interests. We are staring at social disintegration, economic stagnation, political repression, and we do not hear anything from you, the Americans, or for that matter from the Europeans.
Of course, you in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes and Islamic jihadists. That’s obviously bogus. If we are talking about Egypt, there is a whole rainbow variety of people who are secular, liberal, market-oriented, and if you give them a chance they will organize themselves to elect a government that is modern and moderate."
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I boycott most cable news, but part of me was curious as to how FOX may spin the events in Egypt into their worldview. I shouldn't have wondered. Warning: if you click the link to the Glenn Beck footage on YouTube, it's like "The Ring" and you will die in 3 days from a stroke (the brain can only handle so much idiocy), unless you show it to someone else first (pick someone you don't like).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/
Since the war in Iraq, it seems, Beck, like others on the right, has changed his mind about the desirability of Middle Eastern democracy. It was only a few years ago, you'll remember, that conservatives were crowing about a new birth of freedom in the Muslim world.
You couldn't make this stuff up: "We've shown you tonight that Hamas, Code Pink"—the feminist anti-war group—"and the Muslim Brotherhood are all linked together." With the future bleak, Beck called on his viewers to pray for "our way of life" and for Israel.
"The whole world starts to implode... This is coordinated."
It must be hilarious to watch Beck play Risk. So it's fine when a bunch of Anglo-Saxon slave-owning farmers demand independence from the tax-and-spend British Empire, but when brown-skinned Muslims take to the streets, tired of their president-for-life and 30% unemployment, it's a radical fundamentalist-progressive conspiracy (if you could get those two camps to conspire together, you would be a master negotiator). All his paranoid talk about the Islamist insurrection spreading across the Mideast and even penetrating Europe is basically McCarthyism 2.0. We later found out that Cold War commies had a really tough time getting along, much less unite and overthrow the capitalist pigs. Does Beck really think that a unified Muslim caliphate will suddenly form across dozens of nations, ethnic groups, sects, etc. in order to destroy us? Even the Muslims in tiny Palestine can't get along. Yes when you dare to let people determine their own destinies, sometimes the results are not to your liking. But that doesn't mean that the worst-case scenario will occur every damn time. This is not an easy situation for the US and other Western powers, and maybe inaction is better than intervention (even on the side of "liberty") and possible backlash from our perceived meddling.
I think El Baradei ruffled a lot of feathers at FOX when he compared the Muslim Brotherhood's influence in Egyptian politics to that of the Evangelicals in the US. I'd probably go further and say that the Evangelicals are more of a threat to Western democracy.
But it is interesting how the Egypt situation is creating a rift among conservatives:
It was never entirely clear how the right's support for political freedom in the Muslim world meshed with its overwhelming contempt for Muslim people... an interesting divide is opening up on the right. On one side are those who actually took all that democracy stuff seriously. On the other are those who see the Muslim world only as an enemy to be crushed and controlled. With a Republican primary approaching, it remains to be seen which view of Middle Eastern policy will triumph among conservatives.
Not surprisingly, the politicians closest to the religious right have been the quickest to side with Mubarak... At least some neoconservatives, meanwhile, have shown an admirable consistency, urging support for Egypt's demonstrators. Michael Rubin of the AEI, for example, wrote a piece for Forbes.com headlined "The U.S. Should Not Fear Regime Change."
This highlights an interesting difference of opinion between neoconservatives and conservative Israelis, who are often thought to move in lockstep. "Israelis aren't on board on the democracy game," says Rubin. "They'd much rather rely on aging dictators to keep things quiet. They're perfectly happy selling out Lebanon to Syria, and perfectly happy selling out the Egyptian people to Hosni Mubarak."
- Michelle Goldberg
