I'm getting a little tired of Conservative fear mongering about the Arab Spring. Yes, it's messy, it's disturbing, it's violent and it's deadly. All of which I would prefer not to happen. In a perfect world, this would have been done peacefully and through democratic means, but as we all know, the Middle East is far from a perfect world.
I hate to risk the wrath of being labelled part of the 'Blame America' coalition, but a lot of this mess can be laid at the feet of Cold War foreign policy. As I've noted before in the past, we're paying the price for a morally questionable foreign policy that lasted decades. While the Soviet Union stood for communism and tyranny everywhere, we stood for democracy and freedom in the United States and Western Europe and backed some very dubious characters everywhere else.
Whether that was the price we paid for making the world safe for communism is a whole other debate, but the fact is that we got locked into support for a lot of these regimes and have been far from willing to seriously pressure them to reform themselves- especially Egypt. While the Obama Administration's response to a lot of these uprisings seemed to be hesitant a lot of the time, this is the hand we dealt ourselves by not pressuring Mubarak for real, serious reform.
You play the cards you're dealt, no matter how you slice it. And while I think the entire region will probably be messy for some time to come, there are reasons to hope in Tunisia and Libya and the military is enough of an entrenched institution in Egypt, it's hoped that pro-democracy people get this under control quickly, because if free elections turn into violence I have no doubt that the military will just not leave power.
Whether we want to wish this on ourselves (with an 'American Fall' as Van Jones is preaching) is another question entirely-- more on that next.
No comments:
Post a Comment