Iranian state media coverage of the Egyptian demonstrations has been both ubiquitous and remarkably candid, if a bit oblivious to its connotations. Iran’s government-employed news commentators have been quite critical of the use of force by pro-Mubarak supporters against unarmed protesters on the streets of Cairo, apparently totally unaware of the irony of their criticism. Meanwhile, both leaders of the Green Movement and supporters of the Iranian regime have taken turns claiming the mantle of the young Egyptian protesters for themselves and comparing each other to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. ~Reza Aslan

State-run media or not, this would hardly be the first time that media outlets have valorized the opponents of an officially vilified regime and professed outrage that the regime would use force against them. The same outlets then become curiously silent and indifferent when their own government or allies engage in similarly outrageous behavior. Applying this sort of double standard is depressingly common.

I doubt that Iranian state media employees are unaware of some of the similarities between the Egyptian protests and the protests in their country in recent years. They are reflecting the views of Iranian government leaders, who may very well believe that the two sets of protests are very different. Nationalists anywhere in the world are likely to see opposition to their own government very differently than they see the opposition to governments elsewhere.

For many nationalists, dissent and protest against the government or an allied government are signs of disloyalty and possible sympathy with the enemies of the nation and its allies, and people who are protesting against an enemy government are naturally perceived as courageous allies that deserve sympathy and support. This is what some conservative critics of the administration have been doing when they denounce Obama for being too hard on Mubarak and too indifferent to the Green movement. They accept that democratic protests are effectively a form of subversion, and they want that subversion directed only at governments they oppose. This line of criticism is hard to take seriously, since Obama seems to be doing all that he can to slow down the political transition in Egypt, and there was nothing that he could have done for the Green movement even if he had thought it was a good idea, but it fits the pattern described above very nicely.

When the other government is a recognized rival and opponent, that makes the application of the double standard that much easier: the enemy regime is cruelly mistreating its people, while our government (or our ally’s government) is merely restoring order and keeping the country safe from foreign subversion. Indeed, the more poisonous the relationship between two states the easier it is to attribute any dissent to the activities of the agents of the other state. The Egyptian regime has been claiming just this sort of outside agitation by its enemies, just as the Iranian government insisted on seeing the election protests in 2009-10 as a foreign-backed “color” revolution. This is not only a reliable propaganda device to convince undecided people to think twice before sympathizing with the protesters, but it is also an expression of the (delusional?) confidence in the regime that it still retains the support of most of the people.

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 butharping 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 predictablywhining 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.

This last point seems vital: even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take control of Egypt are there any grounds for supposing they can meet the economic and political demands any new government must address? Islam does not have an answer for poverty or frustrated opportunity. If it pretends to and then fails then it too will surely and eventually be seen as yet another bogus bill of goods. ~Alex Massie

To answer Massie’s first question, no, I don’t think anyone expects this group or any other in Egyptian politics to be able to meet Egypt’s economic and political demands. The “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela hasn’t delivered good governance, but once Chavez and his allies were in power they rigged the system to make it extremely difficult to remove them from power. Political movements don’t need to succeed in serving the public interest in order to keep their grip on power, and Egypt doesn’t need to suffer from an Islamic revolution to experience even more catastrophic misrule than it is currently experiencing.

While we’re on the subject, it is worth citing Chua again:

On the contrary, for at least a generation, the effects of marketization in the Middle East would at best produce only marginal benefits for the great mass of Arab poor. However correct in theory, free trade agreements and privatization–in the absence of major structural reforms, which are highly unlikely to occur–cannot in the short term alter the pervasive illiteracy, corruption, and Third World conditions prevailing throughout the Arab states. (p. 226)

A generation is an exceptionally long time in politics, especially democratic politics, and it is difficult to imagine that a democratic electorate is going to tolerate a generation’s worth of free trade and privatization policies that mostly benefit the upper and upper-middle classes. If Egypt were subjected to the sort of shock therapy privatization and democratization that Russia experienced in the early ’90s, it is easy to see how a democratic system would turn into an authoritarian populist one in very short order. Poor countries in economic distress are just about the worst candidates for democratization, and any democratic government that has to confront such problems is going to become rapidly discredited because it will not be able to address them all in a satisfactory way.

While Western capitals were condemning the suppression of Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, Arab officialdom remained silent because they don’t subscribe to any democracy agenda. Worse, Washington’s pressure on Mubarak has already unsettled its Gulf allies who feel that the U.S. is foolishly pursuing a democratization agenda that has repeatedly worked to Iran’s advantage. ~Emile Hokayem

The good news is that the U.S. hasn’t been pursuing the foolish democratization agenda as much as it used to, but the problem is that democratist arguments are gaining influence again despite having absolutely no credibility. The least credible democratist argument circulating right now is that the U.S. must suddenly wash its hands of allied dictatorships and start backing popular protest movements, as if that will somehow erase the long history of cooperation and backing up until now. As Hokayem explains, this will do very little to help the U.S. with Arab publics that have been alienated long ago:

Thanks to repeated blunders, questionable relationships, pervasive interference, and failure to advance the Palestinian cause, the United States’ image and credibility in the Arab world are beyond repair. A greater Western commitment to democracy promotion would help only at the margin of Arab perceptions.

Meanwhile, democracy promotion will continue to undermine the U.S. position throughout the region, just as it has been doing for eight years:

Regardless of whether Mubarak goes (now or in September), the regime survives with the military at the helm, or the transition occurs along the lines wished by U.S. President Barack Obama, Egypt will be strategically paralyzed, operationally weak, and inward-looking for the foreseeable future. In zero-sum realpolitik terms, this is a net loss to U.S. regional policy.

Of course, many of the loudest critics of the administration’s cautious response to events in Egypt are also among the loudest critics of its handling of allies. Democracy promotion policies have advanced Iranian regional influence and helped to undermine America’s alliance system in the region, and yet democratists have the nerve to accuse others of “snubbing” allies.

Most of Hokayem’s article is quite good, and he makes a number of astute observations, which is why I was dumbfounded to read his recommendations:

In reality, Washington’s best bet is to hope that the Iranians will achieve soon and on their own what the Egyptians may be on the verge of doing. After all, the most potent challenge to the Khomeinist narrative came from within Iran in the aftermath of the fraudulent 2009 presidential election, and an inward-looking Iran would stop exporting its disruptive model of resistance.

If that’s Washington’s “best bet,” the U.S. should stop gambling. The hope that Iranians will force regime change from within as the Egyptians are trying to do is a vain one, and the confidence that a new regime in Iran would be “inward-looking” and no longer support proxies overseas is baffling. The U.S. has to adjust to a region in which Iranian influence continues to grow, and it cannot keep waiting until the Iranian opposition somehow acquires the means to take over. One thing that it shouldn’t do in the meantime is to aid in the collapse of any other governments that serve as bulwarks against Iranian influence.

In one sense, the revolts are aimed at the “Arab exception” – the dismal record of oppression and dictatorship that has so far prevented the Arab world from taking part in the democratic and free-market wave that has swept Latin America, Europe and much of east Asia since the 1970s. If this is the narrative that prevails, then a postrevolutionary Egypt might actually look to the west as the exemplar of the liberal political and economic values it is now seeking to embrace. ~Gideon Rachman

This seems very unlikely. Amy Chua assessed the likely effects of rapid democratization in the region in World on Fire, and her judgment still seems correct:

Meanwhile, even if the turn to fundamentalism in the Middle East is a product of closed or repressive political regimes, it sadly does not follow that political liberalization in the region today would lead to moderation–or, for that matter, to pro-market regimes. On the contrary, rapid democratization in the Arab states would likely be a recipe for extremist politics, dominated by ethnonationalist (if not fundamentalist) parties unified in their hatred of Israel and the West.

She wrote at the end of the same chapter:

While free market democracy may well be the optimal end point in the Middle East, the simultaneous pursuit today of laissez-faire markets and immediate majority rule would almost certainly produce even more government-sponsored bloodshed and ethnic warfare.

Western sympathizers with the Egyptian protesters are fairly confident that there is nothing to fear from rapid political change in Egypt because the crowds in “the Republic of Tahrir” are mostly secular democrats with what seem to be reasonable constitutional demands. It doesn’t seem to bother these sympathizers that the crowd may not be broadly representative of Egyptian political opinion*. Mass democracy tends to encourage identity politics to the detriment of minorities, be they political, religious, or ethnic. It often empowers different forms of collectivism, and it especially rewards nationalists. Neither of these is particularly compatible with liberal political and economic values broadly defined. It is important to stress here that this is the result of a functioning mass democracy. Most of the worrisome scenarios we have been discussing concern a hijacked or diverted revolution that turns into another dictatorship, as if the only danger came from the failure of democracy to take root. There hasn’t been nearly enough discussion of what could happen to Egypt if democratic revolution is successful.

* It should give outside observers pause that a large number of Westerners were convinced without much evidence that the Green movement was broadly representative and was bringing about “the Green revolution” with the potential to topple the Iranian government. They mistook a civil rights movement for a regime change movement, and identified a small minority of Iranians with the broad majority. Now that we are seeing a genuine regime change movement in Egypt, many of the same optimists are back again to celebrate Egyptian democracy before it has even taken form. It would actually be very unusual for a nascent democracy in the developing world to “look to the west as the exemplar of the liberal political and economic values it is now seeking to embrace.” It doesn’t do anyone any good to set unreasonable expectations for what political change in Egypt might produce.

To that, I would respond with two words: John McCain. Big supporter, in the 2008 campaign at least, of confronting global warming. Big supporter, in the 2008 campaign at least, of comprehensive immigration reform. Huge campaign finance reformer. He liked some Democrats so much that he wanted to pick one as his running mate. And yet, after hundreds of articles were written about why McCain was not conservative enough, after months of talk radio condemnations of McCain, he won the Republican nomination. Why? Because Republicans have a long history of being (small-c) conservative in their selection of nominees. They tend to go for the guy they know, the one they think can win. ~Michael Scherer

It’s these last two that are particularly important, but that doesn’t bode well for Huntsman. There’s no question that defeating Obama is a higher priority for most Republicans than insisting on ideological conformity in a nominee, but that doesn’t mean that Republican voters’ assessments of the candidates’ electability will work in Huntsman’s favor. Most Republicans don’t know Huntsman, and once they get to know him they aren’t going to conclude that he can win.

McCain was considered the front-runner in 2007, and despite running an abysmal campaign he held on and won thanks to name recognition, his previous campaign in 2000, and the three or four-way split of the conservative vote. Even so, the lesson many conservatives drew from the 2008 election was that nominating McCain was a bad outcome. His nomination was premised largely on electability, and he lost, so a lot of McCain critics feel vindicated by that. It doesn’t matter to them that no Republican was going to win in 2008 after the financial meltdown in September. A Huntsman candidacy rests on convincing Republicans to make the same electability gamble on a candidate who is much more obscure nationally, who recently served the Obama administration, and whose religion is a problem for a significant bloc of Republican (and non-Republican) voters. In other words, Republicans will have to believe that Huntsman is more electable than any of the other candidates available when he is already less electable than McCain.

Huntsman running in 2012 would be the equivalent of McCain running in 1996 at a time when many fewer people outside Washington and Arizona knew who he was. Even more than McCain, Huntsman will be and will be perceived as a media-created candidate, because the only people talking up a Huntsman candidacy are journalists (and none of them, as far as I can tell, is conservative). Except for some McCain advisors, there seems to be no enthusiasm for Huntsman among any activists, bloggers, pundits, think tank analysts, political operatives, or other Republican politicians. There has rarely been so little interest in a prospective candidate among members of his own party as there is in Huntsman. Maybe that will change a little, but I doubt it. Granted, Huckabee was an obscure candidate for a long time, but he had the advantage of being able to mobilize evangelicals to support him. In many respects, Huntsman seems to be positioning himself as both the anti-Huckabee and the anti-Romney: he won’t make corporate Republicans nervous with pseudo-populist rhetoric on economic issues, but he isn’t going to dwell on social issues, either. There is no Republican constituency that I can see that is clamoring for someone like that.

He [Reagan] was, in fact, a great optimist who saw, seized and created strategic opportunities — in Poland, Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola and elsewhere — to rollback communism.

In Egypt today, the United States has a similar opportunity to rollback radical Islam. ~John Guardiano

It’s one thing for supporters of Egyptian democracy to claim that Egyptians have the right to choose their own government, and that they should be encouraged in this for the sake of “values,” but it is very hard to take seriously the idea that this represents a cunning strategy for securing U.S. objectives abroad. Of those Americans taking an interest in the Egyptian protests, I see them splitting into three groups regardless of party or political persuasion. There are the skeptics of rapid political change effectively aligned with supporters of the status quo, there are democratists who cannot or will not see the contradiction between U.S. interests and ideological imperatives to promote democracy, and there are those who acknowledge and celebrate that contradiction in the hope that continued democratization abroad will force the U.S. to change its foreign policy. The latter two are both different expressions of optimism, and so both are fundamentally flawed. I’ll focus on the democratists in this post.

It’s true that Reagan was an optimist, but I try not to dismiss everything he did on account of this basic flaw. As I was saying yesterday, when Reagan saw an allied despot challenged by the majority of his people he turned against the despot very grudgingly and only when there was absolutely nothing else to do. If one wants to talk about what is or is not “Reaganesque,” it helps to look at the examples that are comparable with the current situation. Subverting communist and/or pro-Soviet regimes was an easy and obvious thing to do during the Cold War. It would have been much less obviously desirable if democratization had meant turning anti-Soviet governments into pro-Soviet ones. Indeed, Reagan dragged his feet on dumping Marcos until the very end (almost exactly 25 years ago) because he feared that communists would take advantage of the situation. If Corazon Aquino had been allied with communists, do you suppose Reagan would have agreed to stop backing Marcos?

It’s odd that Guardiano mentions Nicaragua as one of Reagan’s successes in an argument intended to make conservatives more sympathetic to the Egyptian protests. After all, Nicaragua was one of the main examples Kirkpatrick used in “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to attack Carter for undermining Somoza and enabling the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua. Reagan’s questionable policy in Nicaragua was to try to undo Carter’s mistake by backing the enemies of the Sandinistas. Far from supporting Nicaragua’s ostensibly popular (and, post-1984, elected) government, Reagan was dedicated to overthrowing it. One of the main examples Guardiano uses to praise Reagan shows that Reagan was not only unsympathetic to popular movements when they posed a perceived threat to U.S. policy, but also that he actively tried to defeat them.

Even if the Muslim Brotherhood remained only one force among many in a new regime, a new Egyptian government would almost certainly be much less interested in security cooperation with the U.S., and some or perhaps most members of any new government are going to look askance at U.S. policies. Put another way, the less influence the military has on any future Egyptian government, the less cooperative it is probably going to be. For some Americans, that is an argument in favor of regime change, but it simply doesn’t make sense to argue that empowering the Muslim Brotherhood helps “roll back radical Islam.” If “rolling back radical Islam” is the goal, it is hard to see how empowering some fairly radical Islamists will do that.

What we are likely to see in Egypt is not a repeat of Iran, where fundamentalists took undisputed power, but a repeat of Iraq, where Sunni religious parties did well initially but started to fade, divide and evolve as the powerful Sunni preference for laymen of no particular religious distinction comes to the foreground. ~Marc Reuel Gerecht

Yes, whenever one is in need of an inspiring example of successful democratization in a majority-Muslim nation, Iraq is the first that springs to mind.

Let’s take Gerecht’s claim seriously to see if there is anything to it. One fairly significant factor that Gerecht fails to mention here is that Sunnis in Iraq have been in the position of a deposed minority, and that Sunni identity in Iraq was already to a great extent tied to the old secular order that the invasion destroyed. To make an explicit identification as a Sunni religious party is to guarantee perpetual marginal status in a new system in which Shi’ite-Kurdish coalitions and Shi’ite majoritarianism prevail. What we can see in Iraq is that the parties that represent the sectarian interests of the majority sect retain their sectarian and Islamist character. To take one example, the authoritarian prime minister of Iraq has been a member of the Dawa party, which is a chief member of the current governing coalition. Iraqi Sunnis have every incentive as a sect to work against politicized sectarianism and religious politics. In Egypt, the incentives all appear to be different, and an important part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s appeal is that it is an explicitly Islamic political organization.

Democratization there [Egypt], like democratization of Iran, could thwart the ideologies and fear that move poor countries to spend fortunes on nuclear weapons. ~Marc Reuel Gerecht

There is a great deal in Gerecht’s op-ed to criticize, but I found this to be the most forced and ridiculous of all of his claims. Why would anyone conclude that democratization could thwart “the ideologies and fear that move poor countries to spend fortunes on nuclear weapons”? Democratic governments are no more immune to irrational fear of foreign threats, and sometimes it seems as if democratic publics are strangely prone to panicking about threats to their security. If anything, new democracies may be even more susceptible to the lure of pursuing an ideological foreign policy, and new democracies are more vulnerable to the kind of nationalist demagoguery and fearmongering that supporters of arms build-ups use to advance their policies. Despite Gerecht’s best efforts to minimize concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood in the rest of the op-ed, he must know that it was just a few years ago that this group was urging the Egyptian government to develop a nuclear deterrent:

The most well-organized Egyptian political opposition and the most likely to assault the Cairo regime would be the Muslim Brotherhood, which in July 2006 publicly called on the Mubarak regime to develop a nuclear deterrent.

This suggests that a nuclear weapons capability would be high on the policy agenda for a Muslim Brotherhood–led government in Cairo.

That suggests that democratization in Egypt is likely to empower those forces that are more interested in a nuclear arsenal than the current government. Far from thwarting proliferation, democratization might indirectly facilitate it. Counting North Korea, there are nine nuclear-armed states, and just three of these acquired their nuclear weapons while governed by communist regimes. All of the other six acquired and tested their weapons with the blessing and authorization of their democratically-elected governments. Israel, India, and Pakistan were hardly abundantly wealthy nations when their governments started building their nuclear arsenals. That doesn’t mean that a future Egyptian government will try to build nuclear weapons, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that such an attempt would be successful, but we should understand that regime type is no safeguard against proliferation or ideology. If the government of Egypt or Iran believes it has a strategic interest in building its own nuclear arsenal, it won’t matter if its government is a democratic one or not.