Cairo Ironies

[Geee]

National Review:


FEBRUARY 9, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Cairo Ironies
Same cast of American characters, different play

The United States’ public position on Egypt is “flexible.” That in and of itself is not surprising, given the ambiguities surrounding the Cairo uprising. Mubarak’s Egypt originally offered the United States a continuance of Anwar Sadat’s Cold War anti-Soviet alliance, and later provided a relatively stable strategic partner in the increasingly terror-ridden Middle East. Mubarak’s own escalating authoritarian tendencies were mostly ignored by successive administrations — at best, because he appeared less murderous than the usual Middle East authoritarians and postured as an opponent of the radical Islamists who would otherwise ostensibly rise to power, and, at worse, because realists worried only about how Egypt figured into U.S. strategic objectives, without much concern for the human rights of its citizenry. In any case, a cumulative $50 billion–plus in aid was felt to have given the United States some influence in Egyptian governance, should Mubarak have deteriorated into something akin to Saddam Hussein.

When the protests in Egypt followed the Tunisian unrest, it was hard to discern the breadth of support of the dissidents or exactly what their anti-Mubarak demands boded — anarchy, eventual secular constitutional government, Islamist democracy in the fashion of Turkey, the emergence of another strongman, or a pathway to theocracy in the manner of Iran. But it was easy to see that a return of Egypt to its hostile, anti-Western posture of 1952–1973 would be a strategic disaster to the United States and its allies.

[Valin]

Moreover, the U.S. has always been aware of the disturbing contradiction that Arab authoritarians such as Mubarak were in some sense more liberal than the constituents whose rights they so shamefully abused — at least in matters of anti-Westernism, anti-Semitism, and adherence to sharia law. Plebiscites without true constitutional government and an independent judiciary most likely would lead to a Hamas-like one-vote, one-time climate of terror, not a society like Switzerland’s. Moreover, Westernized Arab elites who talked eloquently about human rights often did so from abroad, failed to represent a majority of their countrymen, or located their idealism in the easy landscape of anti-Americanism.

 

The problem with Mubarak and other rulers is they have spent there time jailing, oppressing, driving into exile all those people/movements that might have brought something like a civil society, with all the rights we in the west take for granted.