The revolt in Egypt brings up, once again, the question faced over and over in America; do we demand that democracy exist all over the world, no matter the cost or content or do we support non-democratic governments who support our goals?
The administration’s critics had a field day last week beating up on Obama for vacillating on whether to back Mubarak or to feed an old ally to the wolves. It took Fareed Zakaria, the smartest guy on TV, to finally put it in perspective when he pointed out that it took Reagan half a year to decide what to do about Marcos when the Philippines’ went up the shoot and it took Clinton over three months to decide what he wanted to do when Indonesia decided it had, had enough of Sukarno. It took Obama all of three days. It took him even less to jump into the Libyan mess but then we never did like Qaddafi.
Of course speed wasn’t the only question. Do we back democratic movement or do we back a government that has cooperated with us but is being oppressive to its own people? Let’s see if we can get a historical perspective.
Ever since the end of WWII the United States has been playing the same international game, first because Communism was the big threat and more recently because Al Qaeda has stepped up to the plate. Most of our governments and all of our Right Wing are and have been of the opinion that these smoldering menaces must be crushed at all costs. This led to wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and many of the current drug problems in South America and Mexico. And that was just over Communism, a non-functioning political system that would eventually undermine itself to the point where it collapsed under the weight of its own inadequacy.
So how did we do? Well, from where I stand we were one for three in the military department losing Korea and Nam and shoving the Russians out of the Atlantic during the missile crisis. I know a lot of guys who would say we had stand-offs in Korea and Nam but all I see, from either Korea or Nam, is a lot of dead American kids and no results. I count that as a loss. South America and Mexico? You tell me.
Now it’s terrorism, a non-governmental projection of unrest and dissatisfaction evidenced to a great extent but not exclusively in the Arab world and aimed at us only when we represent the personification of the evils their leaders have imposed on the people or, in the case of the Arab world, our alliance with Israel.
So how we doing on that front? Well a bunch of Saudis killed three thousand Americans in the World Trade Center and we went to war with two countries, neither of which was the country they came from. To me that is just dumb. But in the meantime we’re propping up a lot of governments that aren’t treating their people very nicely just because they tells us they are preventing terror from leaving their country and coming to ours. What a steaming pile that is.
Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East; the oil runs past the country not under it. We pay their army, supposedly to hunt down terrorists who train there, and send bombs by Fed Ex to our country. The head guy in their army had the nerve, last weekend, to come on TV and say that he could not establish intelligence networks in his country and that they had no idea where the terrorists were training. Who is this clown kidding? This is a country twice the size of Wyoming and mostly sand. No one should have any trouble finding your average sized New York water bug in a place like this.
So why are we supporting this guy? Because he’s smarter than our CIA, who are; after missing what was happening in Cairo, desperate for a score. Better we should pull all funding and tell the officials in Yemen, you find them and bring them to us and then we’ll be happy to pay you for them.
That way, if the people of Yemen get tired of these punks and throw them out, we aren’t stuck with being their friends. We can stand back and say, good for you people of Yemen, and then make the same deal with whoever (hopefully, but not necessarily a democracy) takes over.
In Egypt, they say they want a democracy. People in America like democracy even though they are constantly bitching about theirs. So how do we help the people in Egypt get theirs? Maybe we should take a hint from what happened in Romania in 1989 when Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed. The people who came into power wanted a democracy but had no history or familiarity with how to go about getting it. A friend of mine and his partner, who were in business in Romania at the time, contracted with the U.S. government to set up an organization that instructed those in power in the means by which they could set one up. They laid out the whole governmental process, showed them what departments and agencies they needed and what each did, and helped them set up an entire government, which is still functioning today. Granted it is a very corrupt government, but it is democratic and that’s all they promised. I mean Romania was corrupt to start with; you can’t change people’s nature just by changing their form of government.
So maybe we should make the same offer to Egypt and shortly t Libya. There are a lot of U.S. agencies that are now set up to do just what the Egyptians need. This would also put a lot of our people in excellent positions to sell the benefits of friendship with America to the future leaders of Egypt, Libya and any other Arab country that follows suit.