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De Facto Egyptian Dictatorship Becomes Formal, And Life Somehow Goes On

So Mubarak and the ruling party in Egypt rammed through constitutional changes and are giving the public and opposition almost no time to get a handle on these changes before they are put up for referendum.  This is the point when interventionists of various stripes begin yelping that we must “do something” or complaining that we […]

So Mubarak and the ruling party in Egypt rammed through constitutional changes and are giving the public and opposition almost no time to get a handle on these changes before they are put up for referendum.  This is the point when interventionists of various stripes begin yelping that we must “do something” or complaining that we “haven’t done enough” or hitting the administration for hypocrisy on democracy promotion.  The last point is fair, to the extent that the administration still maintains the fiction that it cares about whether and how Arabs vote, but it has been steadily backing away from its “reform” impulses for months. 

Abu Aardvark (a.k.a., Marc Lynch) notes the rise of “Baathism on the Nile,” which isn’t very surprising, and Kevin Drum pitches in with the predictable complaint:

You will be unsurprised to learn that U.S. reponse has been virtually nonexistent, yet more evidence that George Bush’s commitment to democracy promotion was never anything more than a nice sounding slogan.

But let’s actually think about this for a moment.  Does anyone over here actually want free and competitive elections that would almost certainly be won by the Muslim Brotherhood?  Freedom and democracy sound lovely to most people, but in practice introducing them into certain contexts winds up producing death squads and terror.  We should be very glad that Mr. Bush has reduced his commitment to democracy promotion to the level of nice-sounding slogans.  We would be even more glad if he stopped talking about it at all!  Commitment to full-fledged democratisation in the Near East is fairly crazy, and it has only been after several years of bitter disappointments that the administration has been forced to acknowledge, in deeds if not in words, that it was not a terribly good idea.  The reality of actual democracy promotion in the Near East has meant the increased power of Hizbullah, the Hamas government (which no one knows what to do with now that it’s there) and the farcical Shi’ite sectarian coalition of Maliki.  Thank goodness that we will at least be spared any such “successes” in Egypt.  Indeed, can anyone tell me why we think the internal affairs of Egypt are either our business or our concern?

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