Larison’s pessimism is a sometimes necessary corrective, but his current campaign against Egyptian democracy is confusing. He requests that fans of democracy promotion in Egypt flesh out the connection between economic betterment and free elections. He’s right that democracy by itself can’t fix Egypt – democracy is a tool that can be used to fight corruption or it can be perverted to entrench it. The exact effects of democracy on Egypt are unknowable, but Larison’s abstract arguments against Egyptian democracy are a lot less convincing when considering the alternative – the continuation of a regime that has already failed its people. Democracy is a high risk, high reward proposition, but at least it has the power to produce change. ~Patrick Appel

As far as the corrective goes, I’d like to think that this is what the “current campaign” is providing by way of balancing out the countless arguments in support of rapid political change in Egypt (and especially the opportunistic “we were right” bleating from democratists who haven’t been right about anything so far). It’s true that I am very skeptical of mass democracy as a form of government, but that is because I worry about its potential for degenerating into an equally oppressive despotism, creating majoritarian tyranny, and smothering liberty. I have concerns about the prospects of Egyptian democracy, but what really moves me to keep making contrarian arguments is the need to counter the enthusiasm and wishful thinking that characterize most of the Western responses to these events. What I am most interested in here is that everyone paying attention to these events give some serious thought to how representative of the Egyptian people the protesters are, how Egyptians perceive these protests, and the possible consequences of rapid political change.

If the protesters are actually unrepresentative, that makes a significant difference not only for how we understand what to expect in a democratic Egypt, but it also tells us how successful democratic reformers are liable to be. Austrian liberals made great strides in forcing their government to become a constitutional monarchy with a representative parliamentary system, but they represented a small minority of the population and their politics and their agenda were profoundly unpopular in rural areas and among the working class. As the franchise expanded, they were swamped by mass movements that were more representative of the population and were also strongly illiberal and anti-liberal. Should democracy ever come to Egypt, that process will happen all at once. The Ghad and Wafd parties will be buried under tidal waves of populist, Islamist, nationalist, and socialist sentiment. Perhaps Egypt will still be better off in the end as a result, but it does no one any good to overlook the potential pitfalls.

It may be that the economic policies that would most benefit Egypt and most effectively address the economic grievances of the protesters would also be enormously unpopular and politically radioactive in a democratic Egypt. In that case, democratization might cause Egypt to stagnate economically more than it already has. Economic liberalization was associated with Gamal Mubarak and his circle, and that program is now politically dead for years to come, especially if the military has anything to say about it (and they have a lot to say about it). If most Egyptians see the protests as protests about economic conditions and unemployment, the main causes of instability in Egypt are not authoritarianism and repression as such, and Egypt will likely continue to suffer from political instability as long as these economic problems persist. If most Egyptians do not see a lack of democracy as the principal reason for the protests, that suggests that they may not see constitutional change as a top priority, and they may regard a movement focused on constitutional changes as irrelevant to their concerns. That doesn’t bode well for the flourishing of a functioning democratic system. What I have been trying to do is to use as many concrete examples of democratization as possible, and to discuss the realities of Egyptian politics as specifically as I can, so I would like to think that these arguments have been something other than abstract.

Every time a “color” revolution broke out somewhere in the last decade, we were treated to fairly superficial analysis and triumphalist cheerleading that ignored any explanation for the events we were seeing except for the one that suited our assumptions. When the Green movement protested the election results in Iran, we were bombarded with commentary that expressed with certainty that the movement represented the Iranian people and that the Iranian government was tottering and gravely wounded. These were things that we Westerners wanted to believe, and so for the most part they went unchallenged. They also happened to be wrong. It was only later, after this initial wave of enthusiasm was broken by unpleasant realities, that people started to notice that events were not matching up with the stories we were telling about them. Many of the stories people have been telling about the Egyptian protests do not ring true to me, and so I am trying to explain my objections as best I can. If that is a “campaign against Egyptian democracy,” so be it.

Update: So that there is no misunderstanding about my argument, readers should also look at the follow-up remarks I make in the comment section.

Arizona’s Sen. John Kyl will retire next year, at the end of his third term. Sen. Mitch McConnell touched on this quickly in his boisterous (for him) speech to CPAC, calling the retirement a “big loss for the country.” The conservatives in the hall hardly reacted. There were no gasps of regret.

I’m not sure why. There was nothing in Kyl’s record to offend Tea Party activists. He carried the ball on the campaign to stop new START last year, and it wasn’t successful, but it aligned him perfectly with the right of the party. ~Dave Weigel

My guess is that the audience wasn’t moved for a few reasons. Kyl is the Senate minority whip, and he has been in the Republican Senate leadership since 2007. As long as Tea Party activists correctly see McConnell as a compromised establishment Republican, Kyl is probably tainted by this association with the party establishment. It doesn’t help Kyl that McConnell was the one mentioning the retirement. What certainly doesn’t help is that Kyl voted for the TARP, as most of his Senate colleagues did*, so it isn’t really true that there was nothing in Kyl’s record to offend them. Kyl voted for the bailout that ended the career of at least one Republican incumbent in neighboring Utah.

As for Kyl’s resistance on New START, I suppose it’s true that he defended the position favored by a lot of conservative activists and many Tea Partiers. On the other hand, if fighting an arms control treaty is the main thing he’s known for, that’s more likely to elicit yawns than cheers. As I see it, Kyl’s opposition to the treaty was a bad end to an unremarkable career in the Senate, and Arizona would be well-served to have someone like Jeff Flake take his place in the upper chamber. For the record, Flake voted against the TARP.

* How many Republican Senators returning in 2011 were anti-TARP votes? Just eleven: Sessions, Shelby, Barasso, Enzi, DeMint, Inhofe, Wicker, Cochran, Roberts, Vitter, and Crapo.

Or maybe he wants to play spoiler against Romney? I wonder if there is some history between them, perhaps going back to the Olympics. Some enterprising journalists should start digging around. ~Steven Hayward

Hayward’s suspicions seem to be correct, but it doesn’t take much digging. Once the Huntsman 2012 talk started up again, I noticed this report in The Salt Lake City Tribune describing the bad blood between the Huntsmans and Romney over Romney’s selection to oversee the Salt Lake Games after the corruption scandal exploded. Paul Rolly described the start of the feud:

When Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics bid committee was hit with an international bribery scandal while the city’s Winter Games preparations were still under way, committee head Tom Welch and his chief deputy Dave Johnson were dumped, so local community and government leaders needed a new honcho.

Romney, sired by Mormon royalty whose father George, the former Michigan governor, had been a presidential candidate, was chosen to right the ship. The Olympics were a great success and Romney used that experience to launch a successful bid for governor of Massachusetts and later a run for president in 2008.

But when Romney was selected, the Huntsman family publicly declared that he was part of a corrupt bargain.

Jon Huntsman Sr., the billionaire Utah philanthropist and father of the would-be presidential hopeful, publicly decried the pick at the time and said his son had been manipulated and deceived by the Utah king-makers, including then-Gov. Mike Leavitt.

Huntsman said the selection of Romney made it clear there was a deal between him and Leavitt from the beginning, but Jon Huntsman Jr., who already had impressive credentials as a former U.S. ambassador, had been asked to apply for the job just to give the appearance that there was an honest search.

Leavitt and the other leaders denied there was a secret deal with Romney, but the ice storm between the Huntsman and Romney camps was evident.

Rolly goes on to tell how Huntsman’s decision to back McCain soured the relationship again:

Later, when Romney was contemplating his 2008 presidential bid, Huntsman Jr. was a foreign affairs adviser to Romney. But when the Republican front-runners were set and the campaign began heating up, Huntsman, who had become the governor of Utah, was an early endorser of Romney foe John McCain, the senator from Arizona who eventually won the nomination.

Sources close to both camps told me at the time that Huntsman got an unfriendly call from his fellow Mormon Romney after he announced his endorsement of McCain, and was called an unprintable name.

I wouldn’t put it past McCain and his allies to do what they could to sabotage Romney. McCain seems to take an unusually intense personal dislike of his political competitors, and much of his modern political career has been the result of acting out one grudge or another, but he has normally directed his ire at the politicians who defeated him. The idea that he would be trying to undermine Romney with Huntsman is an entertaining story, but it doesn’t really make sense. Many of Huntsman’s would-be campaign advisors come from McCain’s camp, but they are simply gravitating to the candidate perceived as the most moderate in the field. I don’t see what Huntsman would get by running against Romney just to get back at him because of old rivalries. A Huntsman candidacy would work to Romney’s disadvantage, but Huntsman would have to have more of a reason to run than that.

Via Scoblete, I see that WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) has a poll on Egyptian public opinion. It has several interesting results. Everyone is very excited to point out the relatively low level of support for the Muslim Brotherhood (15% favorability), and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but what I found more interesting is that a combined 33% of Cairo and Alexandria respondents expressed a preference for Mubarak or Suleiman as president. Obviously, that’s not a majority, but put together that is still a large constituency apparently in favor of some form of continuity with the old regime and/or the status quo. Amr Moussa receives 26%. Perhaps this is because of name recognition and stature as head of the Arab League, but Moussa has been in Mubarak’s cabinet in the past and hardly represents a sharp break the old system. All together, that’s 59% favoring one of the old fixtures of the system, and another 33% don’t know or refuse to answer.

Perhaps most important is the Egyptian assessment of the reasons for the protests. Economic conditions, corruption, unemployment, and poor delivery of basic services top the list and make up a combined 65% of the “first most important reason” category, and they make up 51% of the “second most important reason” category. (Multiple responses were allowed.) This is overwhelmingly a protest about lack of opportunity and economic conditions. For just 3%, “political repression/no democracy” was the first most important reason, and the second most important for another 6%. About one in ten of urban Egyptian respondents sees these protests primarily in the terms that virtually everyone in the West sees them. Just 6% cite abuses by the security services, and another 6% cite the issue of succession. I’d be interested to hear from democracy promotion fans how exactly the U.S. could have been changing poor economic conditions in Egypt by insisting on free elections.

The 15% favorable/52% unfavorable rating for the Muslim Brotherhood is important to note, but it’s also worth observing that this is a poll of Cairo and Alexandria residents. Assuming that it is an accurate reflection of the views of residents of those cities, that leaves a lot of Egyptians completely unrepresented in the results. Cairo and Alexandria residents are probably more secular and more hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood than Egyptians outside the major cities. Were there a more comprehensive, nationwide poll that reflected the views of the entire population instead of a sample with a heavy urban bias, we might be seeing significantly different results.

Update: WorldPublicOpinion.org polled Egyptians in the summer of 2009. It’s worth a look to see how its results compare with WINEP’s more recent survey. On the Muslim Brotherhood, WINEP and WPO polls have almost reversed results. In a survey of 600 urban Egyptians from Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, and Subra, WPO found that 29% had “very positive feelings” about the Muslim Brotherhood, and another 35% with “somewhat positive feelings.” It’s entirely possible that the Muslim Brotherhood has lost a lot of support in the last two years, but is it likely that the group went from having a net 64% “positive feelings” result to a 52% unfavorable rating? Is it likely that opposition to the Brotherhood more than tripled from the 16% who expressed “negative feelings” in the WPO poll to the 52% that had an unfavorable view of the group in the WINEP poll?

Furthermore, according to WPO’s poll, 56% said that the Muslim Brotherhood “has found an acceptable way to blend Islamism and democracy.” 60% reportedly believe the government in Egypt “should be based on a form of democracy that is unique for Islamic countries.” As Mark Mellman noted in a column Tuesday, 75% of respondents agreed that “there should be a body of senior religious scholars that has the power to overturn laws when it believes they are contrary to the Quran.” 26% said that a non-Muslim should not be allowed to run for public office, and 34% said a non-Muslim should not be allowed to run for president. Perhaps the WPO results overstate some of these things, but it would seem to be the more representative poll of the two.

Second Update: It occurs to me that the WINEP poll result for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate mentioned in the presidential poll, Muhammad Badi, is potentially misleading. The pollster makes a point of emphasizing the Muslim Brotherhood’s poor showing in the presidential poll (at less than 1%), but the Brotherhood has specifically ruled out running a candidate in the next presidential election. Badi’s likely supporters may know this, and so they wouldn’t volunteer support for a candidacy that they know won’t materialize. Then again, maybe his name recognition is terrible, or perhaps his support really is that low. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t assume we can glean very much from this poll.

Liberal democracies do not tear up international agreements or wage war on other democracies. ~David Cesarini

We have heard some version of this for a very long time. Does it matter to anyone that it is obviously not true? Note that Cesarini doesn’t say, “they tend not to” or “they usually don’t,” but very simply that they don’t do these things. That’s ridiculous.

Aside from the glaringly obvious examples of the South African War, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and WWI, there is always the war between the Union and the Confederacy, whose status as liberal democracies can’t be denied except for the purpose of defining liberal democracy so that it automatically supports the “democratic peace” hypothesis. As for not tearing up international agreements, has Cesarini been paying attention for the last couple of decades? The U.S. has illegally attacked at least three countries in violation of the U.N. Charter, and its respect for the Geneva Conventions during the last decade has not exactly been outstanding. If he doesn’t accept that Lebanon was a democracy at the time, he can argue that the 2006 war against Lebanon doesn’t count, but it certainly wasn’t because of any inherent mechanisms of accountability, transparency, and restraint on the part of the Israeli democratic process. Democratic peace and most democracies’ respect for international law are contingent on a lot of other things, most of which have nothing whatever to do with the democratic element of their governments.

As more countries democratize, it will simply be a matter of time before the democratic peace theory is conclusively shown to be the pleasant fantasy that it is. After all, states typically war with one another for the sake of influence, wealth, and power, and it is rare for a state to embark on a war primarily because of ideological hostility to another state’s form of government. As long as there are states competing for power, wealth, and influence, there will be inter-state wars, and the one fairly certain thing that democratization will achieve is that it will make those wars longer and more total than they would otherwise be. Democratization doesn’t reduce inter-state conflict, and isn’t necessarily conducive to peace.

I was wondering if anyone was going to take the bait of running with the completely discredited Wikileaks-related story on Britian and New START, and Andrew Roberts doesn’t disappoint. It’s a story that is really tailor-made for certain hawkish administration critics. These hawks are convinced that Obama has been sabotaging the “special relationship,” which most Britons correctly believe to be a lopsided scam that harms British interests, and they were absolutely sure that New START was disastrous. In other words, they are very often as wrong as it is possible to be.

It was inevitable that some of them would latch onto the story that claimed that the U.S. had compromised British nuclear secrets as part of the New START deal. There is just one small problem with this. It is absolutely untrue.

Via Doug Mataconis, the State Department explained what actually happened:

This is bunk. Under the 1991 START Treaty, the U.S. agreed to notify Russia of specific nuclear cooperation with the United Kingdom, such as the transfer of SLBM’s [submarine launch ballistic missiles] to the UK, or their maintenance or modernization. This is under an existing pattern of cooperation throughout that treaty and is expected to continue under New START. We simply carried forward and updated this notification procedure to the new treaty. There was no secret agreement and no compromise of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.

Not that it is surprising, but a source inside the British government confirms the State Department’s version of events. All of this was sorted out over the weekend, so I don’t understand why Roberts’ column was published at all. Unfortunately, this seems to be how many people use the leaked cables. Roberts picked up on a claim based on a misunderstanding of one cable that has already been ripped out of context, and he then fit it into his ready-made, paranoid narrative of the horrible anti-British Obama administration. This story got off the ground mainly thanks to general ignorance about the terms of arms control agreements, and it has been kept alive this long by people who very much wanted to see the new treaty fail. These leaks seem to be best-suited to fueling conspiracies and reinforcing existing ideological prejudices.

Update: Jake Tapper has explained how the treaty relates to British SLBMs.

Second Update: Dr. Jeffrey Lewis discussed Britain’s nuclear deterrent in some detail in this post in December 2008, and added a bit more in another post from late 2009, which helps to provide some background and to explain just how unremarkable this part of the agreement is.

Nonetheless, in both instances — for both the Tea Partiers and the Egyptian protesters — there is a rush to smear and discredit legitimate democratic opposition based upon the actions of those who do not really speak for and to the opposition.

American conservatives, who have been smeared too often themselves, should not sanction the smearing of others, especially our democratic allies overseas. ~John Guardiano

This is one of the more creative arguments in support of the Egyptian protesters, but it doesn’t really hold up.

For one thing, the Egyptian protesters are not “our democratic allies overseas.” If Americans wish to sympathize with Egyptian protesters and want to petition the government to lend them support, that is their prerogative, but it simply isn’t true that these people are “our democratic allies overseas.” As understandable and legitimate as their grievances are, the Egyptian protesters are very actively urging the dismantling of a regime that is formally allied to the United States government. That makes them something other than “our allies.” Even if we all agree that the vast majority of the protesters who have shown up in Tahrir Square are well-intentioned secular democrats, that makes them democratic, but it doesn’t make them our allies. Understandably, the Egyptian public is not well-disposed towards U.S. foreign policy in the region, and to the extent that a future democratic Egypt actually represented the views of most Egyptians in its foreign policy it would be one that is largely independent of the U.S. or formally non-aligned. Egyptians would be perfectly within their rights to do that, and it might be best for their interests if they did, but “our allies” are exactly what they would not be.

More to the point, Guardiano objects to “smearing” the protesters on account of the statements or actions of a few unrepresentative individuals. Fair enough. By the same token, Guardiano and other sympathizers should stop promoting the desirability of Egyptian democracy based on the politics of an unrepresentative, self-selecting sample of protesters in some of Egypt’s larger cities. It could be that the politics of the “Republic of Tahrir” happen to be the politics of a broad cross-section of Egyptians, but I don’t know that and neither does Guardiano. If we should avoid “smearing” an entire group because we should not judge them based on the actions of a few, we shouldn’t run to the opposite extreme and claim that the protesters are representative of what Egyptian democracy would mean.

However, the fact that the Middle East is politically and culturally regressive in significant ways mustn’t cripple American foreign policy and reduce the United States to inaction.

To the contrary: the existence of these problems requires that America redouble its efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. ~John Guardiano

There’s no question of “crippling American foreign policy” or “inaction.” If democracy promotion is forgotten and put on a shelf, that isn’t going to cripple American foreign policy. Some might argue that it would have a remarkable liberating effect on American policymakers, who would no longer feel compelled to engage in a torturous balancing act between national interests and the promotion of “values.” Setting democracy promotion aside creates the potential for constructive engagement with a number of important states that is not held back or limited by preoccupation with other states’ internal affairs. To the extent that American foreign policy has been crippled in the last decade, it is thanks in part to a strange commitment to a “freedom agenda” that has largely failed or backfired everywhere it has been tried.

Guardiano wants the U.S. government to prioritize something that runs contrary to many of its stated interests, and which has succeeded mainly in empowering Iran and its allies throughout the region. Redoubling American effort in this area seems likely to accelerate the process of undermining all those states that support U.S. containment efforts. Iran containment seems misguided to me, and I would be pleased to see the U.S. disentangle itself as much as possible from the region, but even I can see how dangerous it would be to subvert not just one ally but an entire region of allied governments for the sake of an abstract commitment to a particular regime type.

P.S. There is no reason to expect that liberalizing and democratizing political reforms are going to undo what Guardiano calls “politically and culturally regressive” attitudes. On the contrary, the typical experience of a democratizing country is that its more conservative social and cultural attitudes become enshrined in law, and political liberals quickly find themselves quickly overwhelmingly outnumbered by the forces of populists, nationalists, and religious enthusiasts. Political liberalism anywhere is only as strong as the constituency of liberals, and without meaningful constitutional protections and protections for minorities a liberal democracy will quickly degrade into an authoritarian populist system that will tolerate or even cater to “politically and culturally regressive” attitudes.

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.