Month: February 2011

I see the Huffington Post has another one of their over-sized screaming headlines: “‘Day of Departure — Will Massive March Force Mubarak’s Hand?”

Yes, that’s right, Arianna — you airhead — Mubarak will be “forced” to kill, jail, and repress the protesters in Tahrir Square and around the country because their march was too massive.

Why does anybody take this social-climbing limousine faux-liberal seriously? She married a gay guy — Michael Huffington came out to her before they tied the knot — so she could stay in the country, and then acted surprised when she “found out” he played for the Other Team. I say put her on a plane — albeit not before disabling her gaudy purple Blackberry — and ship her back to Greece, pronto.

Former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum, the neocon who today poses as a “moderate” Republican, writes:

“There’s a lot of heady talk in the US media right now, from both liberals and conservatives, about the possibilities in Cairo. We all share those hopes. But we all also ought to recognize that popular protests in the Middle East do not typically generate stable democratic regimes, and that even free elections can bring very nasty people to power.”

Very nasty people like Avigdor Lieberman, Foreign Minister of the state of Israel, who, as Christopher Hitchens points out, is “a thug and a demagogue who has called with relish for the execution of elected Arab members of Israel’s parliament if they meet with Hamas, who has demanded the drowning of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea, whose supporters chant “Death to the Arabs” at their rallies, and who has materialized the worst fears of those Arabs who have made the longest-lasting accommodation with the Jewish state.”

Frum wants Western journalists to interrogate anti-Mubarak protesters as to their attitude toward Israel — a “test,” he calls it. And if they don’t pass the test, according to Frum, then this will “warn” us that the protesters are “very nasty people,” and, by implication, inferior to the dictator they want to topple. Of course, one’s attitude toward Israel is the litmus test for Frum and the Israel Lobby. In his new disguise as a “moderate,” this is the one area where he hasn’t moderated: Israel first, always.  Even if it means supporting a dictator.

The New York Times and others are reporting that the Obama administration is working on a plan to get Mubarak out and usher in his Vice President, Omar Suleiman, the former head of Egypt’s feared intelligence service. That Suleiman is the embodiment of the torture regime the Egyptian people have suffered under for thirty years doesn’t seem to enter into Washington’s calculations. The administration wants to buy time — time to soften up the opposition, time to buy up the opposition, time to create their own pet opposition which will follow orders. Above all, they want to stop the example of a mass mobilization that pitched a dictator from power in spite of massive US support, because the uprising is bound to spread beyond Egypt — perhaps to the United States itself.

The idea is to isolate the protesters, make it seem like they’r radical maximalists who don’t care about the fate of the country, and wear them out to the point where they’ll just give up and go home.

That isn’t going to happen. The Egyptians aren’t going to exchange one torturer for another — not after all they’ve been through. Washington’s strategy is typical of the soul-less opportunists in the Obama White House, of which Obama is the epitome.

Sorry, guys — it won’t work. Back to the drawing board you go.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 3rd, 2011:

National Review Online: Foreign Policy Initiative Executive Director Jamie M. Fly opines that the possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood taking control in Egypt is concerning “but the solution is not for conservatives to cling to the supposed stability represented by Mubarak.” He argues that Mubarak’s presidency is “finished” and, “As long as chaos and uncertainty reign, the more likely it will be that extremist elements in the Muslim Brotherhood or elsewhere take advantage of the situation, just as the Islamists did during Iran’s drawn-out revolution in 1978–79.”

The New York Times: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, writes that she knows the Muslim Brotherhood from her experience in a 2002 political campaign, on behalf of the conservative party, in the Netherlands. She repeats the oft-used Islamophobic meme that the Brotherhood, “argue[s] for taqiyyah, a strategy to collaborate with your enemies until the time is ripe to defeat them or convert them to Islam.” Hirsi Ali warns that secular democrats in Egypt must explain to the Egyptian people why a “Shariah-based government” would be a disaster but, “unlike the Iranians in 1979, the Egyptians have before them the example of a people who opted for Shariah — the Iranians — and have lived to regret it.” She concludes, “The 2009 ‘green movement’ in Iran was a not a ‘no’ to a strongman, but a ‘no’ to Shariah.” and “ElBaradei and his supporters must make clear that a Shariah-based regime is repressive at home and aggressive abroad.”

The Weekly Standard: Thomas Donnelly, another fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes about the comparison of the fall of Hosni Mubarak with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. He writes, “It is one thing to acknowledge that we cannot determine or dictate the outcome of the changes coming to the greater Middle East, quite another to act as though we don’t care enough to continue to exert a shaping influence,” calling on Obama to assert greater support for the protesters and to not cut the Pentagon budget. “In sum, at the moment when the movement to create a new order in the region is accelerating – and who can seriously think that the likelihood of violence is diminishing, will be self-regulating, or can be met only with ’soft power?’ – the United States appears to be backing away,” says Donnelly.

Ron Paul spoke to Neil Cavuto on Fox News:

I just listened to a live interview on Al Jazeera English with a 23-year-old woman in Tahrir Square. The pro-Mubarak forces are apparently pounding the anti-Mubarak demonstators in the Square with gunfire this night.

The Al-Jazeera host asked why she and other demonstrators refused to accept Mubarak’s promise to hold elections.

Salma Al-tasi replied: “We do not trust a government that sends thugs to kill us.”

She has more sense than the vast majority of modern political philosophers. And she has more gumption than the vast majority of American political commentators.

(I am guessing at the spelling of her name. If anyone knows the correct spelling [the interview concluded at 4:32 a.m. Egyptian time], please advise and I’ll correct it.]