While March 8 parties are openly supportive of ongoing Egyptian protests seeking the ouster of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, many rival March 14 factions said they believe it’s best to stay out of an internal Egyptian issue. ~The Daily Star

As I have just said below, I don’t think it is all that wise to be declaring support for political movements in other countries when we don’t know what they will lead to, so I don’t fault the March 14 parties for showing some common sense here. (They also have no reason to cheer the downfall of a reigme that has been supportive of their cause.) What is worth noting here is that the coalition that Westerners openly, egregiously support as the only acceptable governing coalition of Lebanon doesn’t want to appear to be taking sides. The coalition that enjoys most of its foreign backing from Syria and Iran is very excited to see Mubarak fall. The parties in Lebanon that American democratists desperately want us to support are staying out of it, and the parties that they despise are actively cheering Egyptian political change. The March 8 parties seem to understand what many American democracy promoters do not: revolutionary change tends to help those forces in the region that the democracy promoters claim to hate.

The March 8 parties calculate that an Egypt without Mubarak is a good outcome for them, and everything the Iranian government has been saying publicly tells us that Tehran takes the same view. Part of this is simply propaganda, and their calculation may turn out to be wrong, but it should be noted that this upheaval in Egypt could be another episode of would-be democratization effectively empowering Iran and its allies. That is not because a democratic Egypt would align itself with them, but because “liberation” will have undermined yet another bulwark against Iranian influence and power, just as the invasion of Iraq destroyed a government dedicated to resisting Iran’s influence*. What is strange is that many of the people who were most eager to invade Iraq discounted this possibility before the invasion, and they have been desperately trying to pretend that this has not been the result of their war at the same time that they urge confrontational policies against Iran. The people who are supposedly the most opposed to Iran’s government have been endorsing every political change in the region that makes the Iranian government more influential throughout the region.

* Containing Iran was not one of the main reasons why Americans should have opposed the war, but greater Iranian influence in the region was a very likely outcome that war supporters blithely dismissed as improbable. Likewise, containing Iran and its allies is a generally misguided policy, and the U.S. should instead pursue rapprochement with Iran, but what democratists are offering us is the worst of both worlds: endorsing political change that makes Tehran more influential (or reduces opposition to its influence) while insisting that the U.S. and Iran must be adversaries no matter what. The point is that their political and strategic judgments are regularly wrong.

Update: Dr. Hadar makes some of the same observations in this very good post:

Indeed, when the leaders of Shiism International will be celebrating their great success in remaking the Middle East twenty years from now, my guess is that W’s picture will be hanging next to that of Khomeini: The secular Arab-Sunni minority that had ruled Iraq was replaced with a government elected in open election by the Arab-Shiite majority that is Islamist and has close ties to Iran – and includes the anti-American followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In other parts of the Middle East, the Freedom Agenda forced the Syrians, led by the secular Ba’ath to withdraw its troops from Lebanon – and through open election created the conditions for the electoral wins of the Hizbollah movement whose leaders have just gotten rid of a pro-American PM and replaced him with their own candidate. And then there was another case of open election in Palestine which brought to power Hamas — strategic partner of Iran and the ideological ally of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Can someone explain to me how a policy that helped shift the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the Levant helped advance U.S. interests? Or how the strengthening of the power of political movements who discriminate against women, Christians, Jews, and gays helped promote democracy and liberalism in the Middle East?