It is a sign of national maturity – the product of hard learning, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – that fewer American complainers are today faulting the Obama administration for not anticipating and shaping events in Egypt. ~George Will

It certainly would be a sign of national maturity if that were the case. It seems to me that the complaining is as loud as ever. Will must not read the Post very often (and I don’t blame him). For weeks before January 25, and constantly in the weeks since then, we have heard nothing but harping from many of the Post’s editors, columnists, and bloggers that Obama failed to anticipate and shape events in Egypt. Months earlier, the Post was predictably whining that the administration had not made democracy promotion a higher priority. In fairness to Will, he couldn’t have seen Jackson Diehl’s latest contribution, but Diehl’s column is a long exercise in claiming that Obama should have seen the uprising coming and he implies that Obama could have somehow prevented it if only he listened to the Working Group.

In fact, all that the Working Group did was to issue the standard refrain that reform was necessary, and failure to push reform could put Egypt’s stability in doubt. This is what democratists always say. It’s no more prescient or insightful than John McCain calling for additional troops in a war zone: he always thinks there should be more troops. That is his default recommendation in all circumstances. Now that there are large-scale protests against the Egyptian regime, which none of the Working Group saw coming (just as no one else did), they are claiming vindication. This is remarkable, since recent events have shown nothing so much as the irrelevance of U.S. democracy promotion or the lack of it. In all likelihood, had the administration followed their every recommendation it would not have headed off the protests or made any meaningful difference in what came later, because the protests are being fueled by economic and demographic realities that the U.S. was in no position to change and unpredictable events, such as Bouazizi’s self-immolation, that were completely contingent and taking place in another country.

My response to all of this is the same as it was when the protests were first starting:

Why are Mubarak and his allies going to set in motion the dissolution of their regime? Unless an advocate of reform can answer that question, calls for pushing political reform in Egypt or elsewhere shouldn’t be taken seriously.

The argument that Western reform advocates make is that pressing Cairo on reform would have somehow headed off an uprising by allowing for gradual political change, as if repealing the emergency law or permitting free and fair elections would have alleviated rising food prices, reduced massive youth unemployment, or distributed economic gains more broadly among the population. The problem here isn’t just that democratists are opportunistically seizing on events in Egypt to make ideological demands on the administration, but that the remedies they have been proposing don’t even address most of the reasons for profound popular discontent.