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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (44233)	2/1/2011 9:34:29 AM
From: GROUND ZERO™	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

How the U.S. Will Lose Egypt The Egyptian protests bear an uncanny resemblance to the 1979 Iranian revolution, the U.S. must learn the lessons of supporting a dictator or risk losing Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood of Hate. The Obama team should be looking closely at Washington’s awful mismanagement of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 to make sure they do not repeat the errors of the Carter administration. The revolutions in Cairo and Tehran have much in common. Both simmered under the rule of corrupt strongmen who had held power for three decades. Both were triggered by new media—audiocassettes in Iran, Twitter and Facebook in Egypt—and both exploded in major regional states, with big populations, strong internal security services and powerful, U.S.-supplied militaries. Both dynasts, Hosni Mubarak and Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, were regarded in Washington as “family friends,” to borrow Hillary Clinton’s phrase. Both had complex societies, with big swollen cities like Cairo and Tehran containing both the most and least educated people in the country: a relatively narrow educated elite and a broad mass of slum-dwellers. The strategic threat of that—then and now—was outlined by the U.S. ambassador in Tehran in 1970, when he predicted, with astonishing accuracy, just how Iranian demographics would shape the coming upheaval. Since most Iranians were “poorly educated and highly ignorant,” any truly democratic movement would “be in a reactionary obscurantist direction under the clergy.” The hand we played in 1979 was self-nullifying, and helped usher in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has vexed and weakened American policy for more than 30 years. The Carter administration was as startled by the revolution in Tehran as Obama was by the wave of revolutions from Tunis to Cairo. Just before the regime began to totter in 1978, Carter’s CIA had predicted that nothing much would change in Iran through 1985: “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation.” As Carter reacted to events in Iran, rifts in the U.S. government confused and demoralized him, and prevented Washington from acting swiftly and decisively to steer the Iranian revolution in a moderate direction. Today in Cairo, President Obama is facing similar hard choices. The error in Tehran in 1979 was one of omission. Frozen by opposing views, Washington did nothing. When the shah left Iran in January 1979 to have his cancer treated, pro-Khomeini demonstrations broke out in every Iranian city. Although Brzezinski and Brown in Washington and General Alexander Haig at NATO headquarters in Belgium were still for unleashing the Iranian military against the ayatollahs—“give the officers a go-ahead,” Brown urged Brzezinski—Carter refused to roll the dice. Obama is now holding our Egypt policy in his hands. He must move fast and deal bluntly with President Mubarak. The Egyptian army must be restrained; credible opposition moderates like Mohamed ElBaradei must be empowered to move the country forward without a breakdown in security or an Islamist coup. Mubarak should turn power over to a respected politician bolstered by Omar Suleiman’s reformed security services, who will loosen their grip but not permit the Muslim Brotherhood to knock over a “national unity government” as easily as Khomeini crushed Iran’s first, mixed “provisional revolutionary government.” None of this will be easily accomplished, and America has only an auxiliary role. But the hand we played in 1979 was self-nullifying, and helped usher in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has vexed and weakened American policy for more than 30 years. thedailybeast.com GZ