Just in case you were lying down on the job of alertness, this headline was designed to startle you into wakefulness. Like the photograph. My Significant Other reacted with alarm when I read it to her, and this got me wondering about why such a sentence is so shocking. And I came to the conclusion that it is shocking because it's one of those things that tap into knowledge we keep buried under the surface and don't really like looking at too closely; and because it's not too distantly far from the truth.*
The international press paints a fairly consistent picture of both Israel and the U.S. in a state of distress over the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, whose nearly 30-year reign as near-dictator has been nearly as ugly as the event that brought him into power: he was one of several dozen officials wounded in the machine gun-assassination of his predecessor, Anwar El Sadat, in October, 1981. Torture. Secret Police. Disappearances. Surveillance. Suppression.
Mubarak is a perfect symbol of a foreign policy quandary that's haunted the United States for decades: what American capitalism wants is the security offered by autocracies like that of Mubarak, wherein trade agreements favorable to U.S. corporations are implemented and enforced; and the aspirations of labor, political and environmental movements - which run contrary to the corporate drive to maximize short term profits - are ruthlessly suppressed. Labor unrest? Kill them. Pollution controls? Strike them down. Political unrest? Stomp it out quickly.
Yet the promotion of what America trumpets as its first love - democracy - to the rest of the world has a tractor-trailer head-on collision with this desire for security. In this respect, America's foreign policy hypocrisy dovetails nicely with the hypocrisy of Israel's internal politics - the suppression of both its Arab and Leftist Jewish population.
To paraphrase a famous American terrorist** - They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Both America and Israel have sacrificed many essential liberties in the name of security...and without any real gain in security. We've been lying down asleep on the train platform where that ole Democracy Train was moored, and the Democracy Train has left us behind.
We aren't welcome on this Democracy Train because we drove a different one up the ass of Iraq (specifically) and the Middle East (in general). The Neo-Cons - e.g. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney, etc - implemented the "Bush Doctrine" which included forceful regime change with the stated intent of bringing democracy to the huddled masses of the Mideast.
Needless to say, this policy didn't work out very well. In fact when one measures it by the metric of "hearts and minds" it seems the whole misadventure truly backfired: in state after state throughout the Middle East, fledgling Democratic movements were crushed as the U.S. rushed to support autocratic regimes it deemed crucial to national security, inspired fundamentalists in Iran to crush dissent as we labeled them as part of the "Axis of Evil," and took the breath away from the young and hopeful as they watched the farce play out through the last decade.
Perhaps the only way in which we can claim a positive role in the unfolding uprisings of the region is through inspiration of despair: things have to become truly hopeless for someone to risk life, limb and family as they take to the streets to face rocks to the head, charging horses or torture and imprisonment. And now that the cat is out of the bag, a movement is underway which owes nothing to the U.S. - other than, perhaps, a sense of allegiance to a period in American history when more than just lip service was paid to democracy. Revolution is an exciting first step: the hard part comes in filling the vacuum that's left behind. In the heady coming months in Egypt, the hope for democracy is tenuous because the very institutions who could help guide the process from within have been so thoroughly suppressed over 3 decades.
*The "nuclear attack" scenario is a mash-up of 2 headline threads that captures the very real fear American and Israeli policy makers must be reeling under now that the status quo is no more: (1) Israel is terrified of Iran's growing nuclear capability - even though it has been granted exception from international conventions regarding its own nuclear capabilities - and has threatened repeatedly to attack Iran's facilities. This could entail nuclear retaliation by Israel on Tehran if it counter-attacked
*Benjamin Franklin. From the vantage point of the British, the leaders of the American Revolution would fall neatly into the definition of the word. (2) Without a strong man in power, the political landscape in Egypt could easily transmogrify into one dominated by sectarian rivalries and culminate in an Iranian-like theocracy - unsympathetic to U.S. or Israeli interests.
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