PrintFebruary 4, 2011
Supporting Dictators
"Obama will be remembered as the President who lost Egypt," said one recent article. I am no fan of President Obama. But to blame him for what is happening in Egypt is perfectly absurd.
How can President Obama control Egypt when he cannot even control what happens in his own country?
Perhaps you remember that Obama received a historic beating during the latest elections. "Shellacking" is how he described it himself.
That election showed that Obama cannot even convince half of American voters to vote for his own party. If Obama is losing America, how can he hold Egypt, a Muslim country on the other side of the globe?
He really has no tools to do this. In America, Obama can at least try to bribe people into supporting him, which is what he has been doing. He has been taking the money of one group of Americans and transferring it to another (his supporters). And yet even that is apparently not working.
In Egypt, Obama cannot do even this. It is true that he can send a few billions in foreign aid to the regime, but most of it never makes it to the people. It stays in the pockets of Hosni Mubarak and his ruling clique of thieves.
We conservatives should be blush-red when so many on the right urge the president to support foreign tyrants. Excuse me -- I meant to say foreign "dictators," as John Bolton so well explained in an interview on Fox News. A fine distinction, that.
Don't you sense that there is something deeply wrong here? We purport to be the light of the world, spreading the ideals of democracy and freedom and such, but in Egypt we support a ruthless dictator. Is it any wonder that so many Egyptians -- as well as many other peoples -- think of us as hypocrites?
Bolton's claims notwithstanding, Hosni Mubarak deserves the boot. He deserves it, because he is a pitiless oppressor who stole election after election. He must go, because he is an embezzler who stole billions of dollars that was supposed to go to the Egyptian people. If truth be told, he should be arrested and tried for his crimes. Justice demands it.
If this is not enough, Mubarak deserves to go because the Egyptian people want him to go. Has John Bolton ever heard of the right to self-determination? Isn't this one of the great virtues we advocate world over? Why are we so eager, then, to force a leader who stands for everything we condemn on another nation?
Some "experts" will tell you that we should forget the hypocrisy of which we are so obviously guilty, because international affairs is a dirty business. The alternative to Mubarak is even worse. Once his regime is out, the forces of Muslim Brotherhood will likely seize power.
That may well happen. But if the fundamentalists get into power, they will be eventually seen for the oppressors and bunglers that they are. They will be hated and resented by their own people, and their regimes will be inherently unstable. And eventually they, too, will be toppled, and hopefully the Egyptians will learn that it is not a good idea to let fundamentalists rule over you.
But now the Muslim Brotherhood can portray themselves as angels of light by wanting to get Egypt rid of a corrupt and oppressive regime. Is it such a surprise that most people support them? The Islamists have a point, don't they? Mubarak is clearly bad.
How absurd is it when the Islamists demand what is right while many on our side are not only wrong, but also hypocritical? This should not be so.
The notion that we can permanently control the destiny and politics of faraway Muslim nations is misguided. In Afghanistan, we have been trying to do this for a decade, at great expenditure of blood and treasure, and they still do not see things our way. Neither do those in Iraq, it would appear.
Do not fault Obama for something over which he has very little control. There are plenty of other things he justly deserves to be blamed for. Let us focus on those.
And one more point: Some of us are so concerned that Egypt is falling apart that we have not noticed that our own country is also falling apart.
Let us not be so taken up by Egypt that we overlook the depth of our own predicament: We live under a far-left administration that presides over a managerial redistributive bureaucracy in which both Democrats and Republicans merrily take part. Our freedoms are being taken away on a daily basis, and we have debts that we will never be able to pay. We are increasingly unfree and utterly bankrupt. This is not a good combination.
It is only a matter of time before our currency and economic system come crashing down. When that happens, Egypt may not look to us like such a mess anymore.
Would not this be a good time to stop poking our nose into other people's affairs and start taking care of our own business?
