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Democracy dawns in Egypt

Submitted by producer on Fri, 02/11/2011 - 14:43
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Yesterday I was humbled talking by phone with a seventeen year old reporter (in the middle of the world's biggest breaking story) as I learned more from the vivid word pictures she portrayed than from watching days of TV. Bravo Jessica Elsayed and welcome to a better day as democracy dawns in your proud and plundered country.

Reality finally permeated the patriarch's delusions from decades of his mummified rule, when Mubarak's own military showed him the door. Now that he has been deposited in one of his many mansions in Sharm El Sheik, his successor and right hand man Omar Suleiman takes over, with Egypt now in the bloody hands of a torturer, and a hands-on torturer at that. 

 
Transition is the operative word here because the generation of educated and frustrated young Egyptians who led this revolution, will not stand for it if their hard-won battle is stolen from them in back room deals brokered by the same kleptocrats, thugs and courtiers who have been stealing their future since they won independence from their colonial overseers. Obama has clearly been navigating between the call of history and desperate calls from Middle East potentates and demands from the Israeli Right to back stability over democracy. 
 
But Obama appears to understand that our tired Realpolitik calculus no longer applies because acting according to our ideals and not in our so-called "interests", is the only chance we have to hold on to any influence we might have left in the Middle East after a precipitous and catastrophic loss of American hegemony in the region since George W. Bush and the neocons misapplied American power in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
Thank God for the American media, and more importantly, social media like Facebook and Google. The young Egyptians are thanking us for that, not our government's mixed signals, today's inspiring speech by President Obama notwithstanding.. 
 
There is also a lesson for us at home as our own conservative revolutionaries gather in Washington at CPAC and fulminate against the very government they represent. Their anti-environment and alternative energy tirades can't disguise their budget priorities that are driven by big oil and dirty coal. They could not be more hopelessly out of touch, as they increase our dependence on foreign oil and cut funding for foreign aid which is what was missing from the quick victories followed by slow defeats we are suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Because we did not deliver on the "soft power" we have in abundance. 
 
Also conspicuously absent from the Egyptian revolution was the Tea Party's second amendment solutions. This was an unarmed non-violent people power revolution. And while "the tree of liberty was refreshed by the blood of patriots", the tyrant was eased out by his own well regulated militia. But not only have the American and Israeli Right been shown to be irrelevant as recent events unfolded, Al Qaeda is also sidelined by history. Our values and our interest are, for the moment, one in the same, and that is a win-win we can live with.