Posted on 02/28/2005 1:04:52 PM PST by WarrenC
Mubarak's surprise surrender to democratic forces--without a fight no less--got the headlines, but little else. In fact, Mubarak's Friday speech could well be marked by future historians as the equivalent of the first hammers to hit the Berlin Wall in October 1989. Even more astonishingly, it is the lightning fast conclusion to the seemingly impossible journey on which George Bush set out--against the wisdom of his advisors and every Middle East expert (including myself)--in January of 2003.
The journey actually began with a PowerPoint presentation at the Pentagon in 2002. That presentation, supposedly given by Richard Perle, is cited as evidence by the anti-semitic left to prove that a Jewish cabal really does control this country and is behind the whole Iraq war.
Well, the presentation really did happen, but it was far less diabolical than the hyperventilators would have you believe. Perle wasn't a presenter, but a member of the audience. It was at a routine meeting of a Pentagon advisory board that Rand analyst Laurent Murawiec (whose public resume bizarrely includes a fling with LaRouche and just about nothing else) laid out a philosophy based on the old addage "When it rains on the Tigris, Egyptians open their umbrellas." Every region of the world probably has a variation of this phrase (I've heard "the Moscow river":"Istanbul" and "the Thames: Dublin" as substitutes--If you've heard of others, please write them down in the comments section).
Murawiec's slideshow (scroll down to bottom of Shafer's column for a text reproduction of it) presented the case for regime change in Baghdad, supporting a democracy there, dropping Saudi Arabia as our primary ally in the region, ignoring the Palestinian/Israeli conflict along with the Syrian threat as sideshows, and then peacefully toppling dictatorship in the real prize country: Egypt. If a democracy can be established in Iraq, Murawiec suggested, democracy in Egypt would be unstoppable. With the Arab world's two primary power bases democratic, the history of the region would transform from one of interminable conflict into an idyllic Arab version of the EU.
Nobody can reasonably claim that the Pentagon took Murawiec's PowerPoint slides and turned them into national policy. After all, we're still in bed with the Saudis and we're still very heavily involved in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
One person, however, borrowed the Baghdad/Cairo concept and made it the centerpiece of his Middle East strategy. He did so against the very strong urgings of every human being who has studied the history of the Middle East or been involved in Middle East diplomacy. "This is a different place with different rules...", we told him. "You're being naive. They're going to chew us up and spit us out...". We begged him to listen. He didn't. And now we're very close to the point where historians will be naming George Bush as the founding father of democracy in the Middle East. Yes, they will gag on the words. But that version of history will be inescapable if the trendline upon which events are currently racing continues.
Of course we're still a very long way from a democratic Middle East. But with the news from Egypt this weekend, we're closer than anyone besides George Bush ever thought possible. And we got there about ten years early. As cute and snuggly as the Egyptian regime is, there is no other adjective that describes it better than tyrannical. It's also very firmly entrenched. Transforming Egypt into a democracy from the roots up would inevitably be a long, bloody and painful process.
Unless, that is, the change comes from the top down. Like Gorbachev opening the floodgates with Perestroika and Glasnost, Mubarak just put the key in the lock and turned it. Change is coming to Egypt in a big way. The revolutionary who brings it is none other than that "simpleton" from Texas, George W. Bush. The path probably won't be straight and the picture might get fuzzy before a full liberal democracy takes hold in Cairo. But when it does, I would suggest anyone living between Rabat and Kuwait City better start putting on their galoshes.
Posted by sjaffe at February 27, 2005 11:30 AM
The Bush Effect.
It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that the pundits were pooh-pooing Bush's inauguration speech as unrealistic. That's right, it was only a few weeks ago.
I'm sure Algore has a scheduled speaking engagement to talk about Bush's foreign Policy failures this week.
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