Mubarak stepped down on Islamic Revolution Victory Day - a holiday in Iran celebrating Khomeini seizing power from Bakhtiar (noted by neo-neocon). Probably not a good omen.
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Americandigest
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With Obama in power its not good to be a friend of America:
Better to be enemies
I note in passing once more that when it was a question of “tilting,” Obama usually seemed more fond of the anti-democratic than the democratic alternative: Syria and Iran were courted, Israel was snubbed; Colombia was ignored, Cuba and Venezuela got “outreach”; Eastern Europe was taken for granted, autocratic Russia was romanced. In short, whether because of Pavlovian anti-Bush tendencies, multicultural preference for authentic indigenous leadership, or wishing a stage for the postracial, postnational Obama to charm our enemies and achieve a “breakthrough,” Obama cared little at all about promoting human rights (note that all Obama’s once shrill civil rights bluster about Guantanamo, tribunals, renditions, preventative detention, the Patriot Act, Iraq, and drone attacks was dropped — on the cynical but correct premise that the left would still idolize a President Obama even if he parroted Dick Cheney).
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Far from being a sort of national liberationist of the left, Obama is simply confused — his advisors now telling him that Mubarak must go, that he must go sometime, that the demonstrators are genuine democratic patriots, that they are dupes who will be pushed aside by the Muslim Brotherhood, which itself is either sinister or in fact reformed and a possible future U.S. partner.
In turn, the president seems to voice the last advice he was given, and so we are to assume two things: one, his make “no mistake about it” declaration will change and soon be rendered obsolete as conditions on the ground in Egypt change; two, he will artfully inject himself into the breaking news by the overuse of the now accustomed “I, my, mine” as he is self-constructed to be the catalyst for all that is becoming good and a long harsh critic of all that is turning bad. In other words, Obama will talk far too much and seek to turn someone else’s revolution into a showcase of his own rhetoric. And in adolescent fashion, Obama will reveal private conversations he has had with Egyptian leaders, both breaking confidentiality and portraying his interlocutors as either agreeing with his own advice or nodding to his dictates and directives.
What do I derive from all this? Hillary was right about her 3AM slur, and Obama is acting as any 2-year Senate veteran might in such a crisis. There is no consistent support from the left for democracy movements overseas. Strongmen like Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad, and Assad are weirdly seen as either untouchable or genuine in a way a Mubarak or a Jordanian king is not. And the latter are vulnerable only when it looks like they may fail; if they seem stable, we hear not a peep from Obama about their human rights records.
In short, the left has not yet sorted out its adherence to multiculturalism and its supposed support for human rights, which are usually antithetical.
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Predictions? I think unfortunately we may go the 1940s “we can work with Mao”/1970s “no inordinate fear of communism”/2000s “jihad can mean a personal struggle” route, where liberals believe that totalitarian nationalists somehow admire the American Revolution and our lack of a colonial heritage, and, as closet moderates, wish to work with us. That translates into a backdoor courtship with the Muslim Brotherhood, in the fashion we did with Khomeini, and ends in a decade or so with a Sunni Ahmadinejad and the betrayal of the present protestors — again, in the manner we did the Iranian moderate reformers in 1979-80 and again in 2009.
How odd that in support of the brave secular protestors in the streets of Cairo, we are already talking about not demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood — the existential enemies of every idealist now trying to win a free society from Mubarak, the dictator/non-dictator who must go now!, very soon, after he transitions a new government in the summer, when a new president is elected in the fall, or, as future events dictate, not at all.
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