Two Paradigms

Pundits on both the Left and the Right argue that the regime of Hozni Mubarak must go, and many urge President Obama to take a hard line with Egypt’s strongman, including withholding all foreign aid. The purpose is to allow the Egyptian people to create a liberal democracy.

As I mentioned in the last post, these recommendations have an eerie similarity to those that were offered when the Shah of Iran was deposed in the late 1970s.

Caroline Glick is one of the few hard-eyed realists who recognize the dangers of these recommendations. She writes:

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak's regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal. Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June, 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics.

When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN's Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

The naïve assumption that Mubarak’s pro-Western dictatorship will be replaced by a liberal democracy is fantasy. In all likelihood, any new regime will morph into an anti-Western, Islamist theocracy.

But why have both the Left and the Right jettisoned the Pro-Western Egyptian government so quickly. Again, Glick’s insight is worth noting:

Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world's only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can't see their way past them.

The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush's democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.

Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush's push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.

The problem is that while Bush's diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.

Glick describes the second paradigm in terms of the Left’s “anti-colonialist” world view. She writes:

Frustratingly, Bush's push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites - anti-colonialism - Bush's leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.

It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration's foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.

As Obama put it at the time, "It's not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections."

Both paradigms have caused both the Left and the Right to lean toward regime change in Egypt. They should be very careful what they wish for.