Bye Bye, Mubarak
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
If only W. had waited for Twitter.
And Facebook. And WikiLeaks.GREAT PUNCTUATION. WHAT A FUCKING START! Does anybody edit her shit?
Revolutionary tools all, like the fax machine in the Soviet Union.(this may well be the most cogent thing MoDo ever comes up with) 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.But wait a minute - didn't we invade Iraq to bring democracy to the Arab world - and Afghanistand, and Pakistan, and East Yemen, and ... WAZZUP with these damn A-Rabs - don't they get it that democracy is a gifted grants only by the U.S. almighty?
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. I will concede, that here, Mo has turned a very interesting phrase
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. END the awful hpyocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers? CODDLING? We give them big slurpy blow jobs, billions of $s, and enough modern military hardware, software, and technology that we have to invent the next generation of military hardware, software and techonology to be able to defeat them should they opt to turn that which we have given them around and shoot it at us!
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.”WELL PUT RICHARD HAASS - who must have the highest geo-political IQ of any one to ever serve GWB's boss, PRESIDENT Dick Cheney.
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. (BUT YOU SURE CAN TRY)
In his second inaugural, President Bush pledged a goal of “ending tyranny in our world.” (YES -- only a Bushie, and Yalie, and a Hahvahdee would be imcompetent enought to think like that, but, that is how he thunk and continues to thunk) 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. (Which is something that the US international community has still not reckoned with - and, are you REALLY so sure this is what he learnt?)
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.” (HIJACKED? they are particularly vulnerable to becoming DEMOCRACIES by way of 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.” GO OFF THE RAILS? WTF is that supposed to mean?
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.” Indeed, humiliation is a powerful motivator anywhere.
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. YES .. and his re-election too. It worked!!
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 - it was always the U.S. actions - the occupations of the holy lands of Saudi Arabia by US armed forces, the invasion(s) of and murders of the Iraqi people, and the continuing support of the Israeli government in its suppression (murder, torture, illegal detention) of the Palestinians - not to even MENTION to cruel status imposed on the dispossessed Palestinians who are human beings with no country to call home. But to try to fulfill his grandiose promise to defeat “every terrorist group of global reach,” But - of course, he didn't mean terrorist groups that burn abortion clinics and murder abortion doctors 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. NICE Intel from the combined national intelligence apparatus - HAMAS wins! Who cooda knowed?
“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. What did you think they were gonna do? Provide medical, educational, and employment services to the Palestinian peoples? Which they have done and continue to do?
“The great fear that people have with Islamist parties is that, if they take part in an election, that will be the last election,” Which would return the situation to the status quo pre-WWII 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. YES, because "Islamists" are in fact part of their societies, in fact, they are the MAJORITY , the overwhelming majority in each and every one of their societies.
“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.And quit giving blow jobs to the dictators, and quit giving them money and arms --wait ... your money is in their pockets ... same place as your mouth is ... horrible metaphor
“Obviously, Islam needs to make its peace with modernity and democracy. JEEZUZ FUCKING CHRIST - ISLAM is the heart and soul of modernity and democracy ... ASSHOLE But the only way this is going to happen is when people speaking for Islam take part in the system. TRUST ME ... Muqtada Sadr IS taking part in the system - the Ayatollahs are taking part in the system .. etc, etc, etc It’s incumbent on Islamists who are elected democratically to behave democratically.” STOPP bombing them; stop assassinating them.
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.”
OK .. this was not good MoDo, this was not bad MoDo, this was not Snarkie Modo ... this was simply out of her depth MoDo, having been given an assignment that is beyond her intellectual capacity to fathom. FOR SHAME on you, Arthur Sulzbury.
