Well that was quick. I don't think I've ever made an accurate prediction before. Go on, tell me how awesome I am. Eleven days ago, before Egypt, when Tunisia was still the only country rebelling, I said like a boss:
Mark my words, if this unrest escalates, and the idea of democracy becomes more popular throughout the Arab world, neocons will ignore the real reasons why it's happening, and instead point at Iraq. Bush sympathizers have been telling us for years to wait for history to judge him, as if they're expecting the entire middle east to look towards Iraq and succumb to democracy on their own. They're going to go back to the Vietnam-era "domino effect", and say it's all because George W. Bush showed the poor savages what democracy is."
Well, Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser for the Bush administration, has fulfilled prophecy. Read it and weep. Literally. I'm weeping right now. Why would anyone say things like this? Why do such mind-numbingly stupid people exist?
Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world
For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their "freedom deficit" signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. In November 2003, President George W. Bush laid out this question:
"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"
The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism. Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections. The Arab world may not be swept with a broad wave of revolts now, but neither will it soon forget this moment.
So a new set of questions becomes critical. What lesson will Arab regimes learn? Will they undertake the steady reforms that may bring peaceful change, or will they conclude that exiled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali erred only by failing to shoot and club enough demonstrators? And will our own government learn that dictatorships are never truly stable? For beneath the calm surface enforced by myriad security forces, the pressure for change only grows - and it may grow in extreme and violent forms when real debate and political competition are denied.
[...summarizes the situation...]
All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely to support the expansion of freedom.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
This spirit did not always animate U.S. diplomacy in the Bush administration; plenty of officials found it unrealistic and had to be prodded or overruled to follow the president's lead. But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right - and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy.
U.S. officials talked to Mubarak plenty in 2009 and 2010, and even talked to the far more repressive President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but they talked about their goals for Israeli-Palestinian peace and ignored the police states outside the doors of those presidential palaces. When the Iranian regime stole the June 2009 elections and people went to the streets, the Obama administration feared that speaking out in their support might jeopardize the nuclear negotiations. The "reset" sought with Russia has been with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, not the Russian people suffering his increasingly despotic and lawless rule.
This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration's approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning to rebel against those rulers. "Engagement" has not been the problem, but rather the administration's insistence on engaging with regimes rather than with the people trying to survive under them.
If the Arab regimes learn the wrong lessons and turn once again to their police and their armies, the U.S. reaction becomes even more important. President Obama's words of support for both the demonstrators and the government late Friday, after speaking with Mubarak, were too little, too late. He said Mubarak had called for "a better democracy" in Egypt, but Obama's remarks did not clearly demand democracy or free elections there. We cannot deliver democracy to the Arab states, but we can make our principles and our policies clear. Now is the time to say that the peoples of the Middle East are not "beyond the reach of liberty" and that we will assist any peaceful effort to achieve it - and oppose and condemn efforts to suppress it.
Such a statement would not elevate our ideals at the expense of our interests. It turns out, as those demonstrators are telling us, that supporting freedom is the best policy of all.
"All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological..."
Are you shitting me? Does he not know about that one little time Obama visited Cairo and spoke to the entire Muslim world?
"I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.
That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.
There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people."
Sorry, B-Rock. According to Elliott Abrams, you never gave that monumental speech.
Granted, my prophecy wasn't entirely fulfilled. He didn't mention Iraq a whole lot specifically, and instead focused more on the "BUSH LIKES FREEDOM AND OBAMA DOESN'T" idea. Of course, that's why half of all conservatives right now are freaking out over what actual Egyptian freedom would look like -- that of the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious, nonviolent, political party, potentially gaining the support of the Egyptian people after Mubarak falls. When it serves their interests, Republicans love freedom!
And the saddest part of all? This is going to work. Neocons are great at rewriting history. They've already convinced their supporters that Republicans founded America. World War II of course fixed the Great Depression, and the New Deal had nothing to do with it. Ronald Reagan single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union, and he personally tore down the Berlin Wall brick by commie brick. A couple years ago I asked a German coworker at camp her opinions on the fall of the wall. She's lived in Germany for her entire life. She'd never heard of Ronald Reagan.
I'm not trying to undermine all the freedoms that Iraq has gained because of George Bush. Iraqis have their democracy. It's a good democracy, and it works, and I'm extremely happy for them. But 109,000 innocent civilians died in order to achieve it. That's not combatants. That's every day people, just like you and me. That's 9/11, thirty-six times over. And this is the lowest estimate. Other estimates range wildly from 150,000 to 600,000 to over a million deaths. How many Egyptians have died for their revolution? About a hundred, give or take. I hate playing numbers games with human lives, but it's really hard to ignore when the difference is so drastic. And I'm not claiming speak on behalf of the Iraqi people on whether they're happy about their new government or not, because they don't speak as one universal voice. Their opinions are extremely divided about it. My point is that Bush's method of achieving freedom in the Middle East is invading nations and stealing their oil at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. That's not how you establish democracies. Democracies happen when people rise up for themselves to fight their own battles, to form their own governments, the way they choose. Like how America did it.
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