February 9, 2011: What part of this Daily Beast summary from Reuters do you believe?
The third week of protests in Egypt could be the biggest: Following Tuesday’s enormous demonstrations, in which record numbers of protesters poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Google executive Wael Ghonim spoke, the opposition to President Hosni Mubarak is organizing another big protest for Friday. The White House, meanwhile, had Joe Biden push Vice President Omar Suleiman to end Egypt’s 30-year emergency law and for “prompt, meaningful, peaceful, and legitimate” transition. The BBC says the U.S. is no longer focusing on President Hosni Mubarak’s future, but rather pushing for concrete reforms.
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The United States is the leader of the free world. Most of our presidents throughout the 20th century espoused the idea of democracy but made deals with dictators. Both President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush have been outspoken advocates of spreading democracy. Most recently it was George W. Bush who insisted that removing Saddam Hussein as the dictator of Iraq would spread democracy throughout the Middle East. So America can’t back down. The problem is the confrontation between America’s political values and its economic interests.
Look at the results of democracy in the Middle East. Iran now has a theocracy with a government that does not permit free elections. Gaza had free elections that the United States supported and the consequence is Hamas in control and little chance there will ever be another free election. Iraq’s government is in turmoil because too many people in that country do not subscribe to the idea that there are winners and loser in every election.
We have seen uprisings before and few have ended as we had hoped. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 ended with the Chinese army killing several hundred people. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government but ended when the army and security forces killed 41 people. The uprising in Tahrir Square, Cairo will most likely end as those two events did. There is no indication that anyone will remove the government of Hosni Mubarak.
I believe that U.S. economic and security interests will prevail within the American federal government. Thus next February all of this will be just a memory. Perhaps this will be a lesson to Obama and subsequent presidents.
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