If only W. had waited for Twitter.
And Facebook. And WikiLeaks.
Revolutionary tools all, like the fax machine in the Soviet Union.
The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies, not the least of which is the American president who inspired such hope in the Middle East with his Cairo speech calling around this week to leaders in the region to stanch the uncontrolled surge of democracy in the Arab world.
Egyptians rose up at the greatest irony of all: Cleopatra’s Egypt was modern in ancient times and Mubarak’s was ancient in modern times. The cradle of civilization yearned for some civilization.
President George W. Bush meant well when he tried to start a domino effect of democracy in the Middle East and end the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers.
But the way he went about it was naïve and wrong. “In many ways, you can argue that the Iraq war set back the cause of democracy in the Middle East,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations who worked at the State Department during Bush’s first term, told me. “It’s more legitimate in Arab eyes when it happens from within than when it’s externally driven.”
You can’t push a morally muscular foreign policy by subverting morality. And you can’t occupy a country only to trade one corrupt regime for another.
In his second inaugural, President Bush pledged a goal of “ending tyranny in our world.” But he only managed to get rid of one tyrant (a weakened one he had a grudge against). He learned that trying to micromanage the future course of the internal politics of another country is very difficult.
As Haass wrote at the time in an op-ed piece: “Immature democracies — those that hold elections but lack many of the checks and balances characteristic of a true democracy — are particularly vulnerable to being hijacked by popular passions.”
Just so, Haass now says of Egypt’s political eruption: “This could go off the rails. The end of Mubarak is like the second inning.”
He said that Mubarak’s “royalist, monarchist pretensions, his plan to install his son Gamal as his successor, truly offended a lot Egyptians, who found it humiliating. Humiliation is a powerful motivator in the Middle East.”
In 2005, Secretary of State Condi Rice chided the Egyptians to be more democratic, but Mubarak continued to stifle his country’s vitality.
W. associated his “freedom agenda” with war.
In another irony, one of the reasons Bush decided he needed to do something about the Arab dictatorships was his belief that they were spawning terrorists. But to try to fulfill his grandiose promise to defeat “every terrorist group of global reach,” he needed the cooperation of the same dictators the U.S. had always supported. And he fell back to relying on the help of dictatorships to try to shut down dictatorships. Instead, he shut down the democratization process in 2006 after he and Rice were blindsided by Hamas winning the Palestinian elections.
“We were overly spooked by the victory of Hamas,” said Robert Kagan, a senior Brookings fellow, neocon and Iraq war advocate who co-founded the prescient Working Group on Egypt, a bipartisan group of Middle East experts who wanted to get the administration to press Mubarak to be more democratic.
“The great fear that people have with Islamist parties is that, if they take part in an election, that will be the last election,” he continued. “But we overlearned that lesson and we need to get beyond that panicky response. There’s no way for us to go through the long evolution of history without allowing Islamists to participate in democratic society.
“What are we going to do — support dictators for the rest of eternity because we don’t want Islamists taking their share of some political system in the Middle East? We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is.
“Obviously, Islam needs to make its peace with modernity and democracy. But the only way this is going to happen is when people speaking for Islam take part in the system. It’s incumbent on Islamists who are elected democratically to behave democratically.”
Members of Kagan’s group met with members of the White House national security team on Monday. He does not think, as some critics do, that President Obama has been too slow to embrace the Egyptian protesters. “It’s tricky,” he said. “Any administration is extremely reluctant to push out a longtime ally.”
But he believes that the administration “really made a mistake not preparing for this a year ago.” He thinks that Mubarak’s health problems emboldened restive Egyptians.
And he advises President Obama — who went on TV Tuesday night to assure Egyptians that they will determine their own destiny, but maybe not just yet — not to count on a long goodbye for Mubarak.
“The notion of trying to figure out a Mubarak option,” he said, of a leisurely transition, “should be dropped.”
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