As if the US could just wave her magic wand and make it so.
What strikes me as odd is that we seem to put so few strings on foreign aid. When the government deigns to give us peasants some of our money back, there’s ALWAYS a string attached. They always do it for a particular purpose. Like, tax credits for having kids, for buying a house, a “stimulus payment” to buy a new car and get your “clunker” off the road. Even when they give states money, there’s strings attached, like when they threatened to withhold highway funds if states didn’t raise their drinking age to 21 or drop their DUI standard to .08 percent.
So why don’t they do that with foreign aid? Years ago, we should’ve been saying to Mubarak, “yes, we’ll give you hundreds of millions of dollars, but you WILL do thus and such in terms of freedom of the press, a republican form of government, etc., or the tap gets turned off, period.” I understand we couldn’t do that as easily when the USSR was still around, but nowadays, when we’re the world’s sugar daddy? They want our crack, they dance our tune. They don’t want to do things our way, they can do without our money.
As it is, we’re seeing the logical conclusion of propping up a dictator for 20 years. Yes, Mubarak is “our” despot, and he’s probably better than the alternative, but the Egyptians are in control of their own destiny now, whether we like it or not. Our time to have much control over the outcome is past.
}:-)4