Not every uprising in that part of the world means that outside forces are to blame.
Tunisia politically blew up because one guy lit himself on fire because the government refused him to give him a license to sell his fruit & make a living. Iranians in 2009 were pissed off because they believed Ahmadinejad rigged his own reelection. Yet its supposedly true here. Why?
Actually that last was a rhetorical question. The $1.5 billion of US aid (much of it military) has everything to do w/ it.
When our government is inept & corrupt & not paying attention to the needs of their citizens &/or not doing something fast enough, we in the US can vote them out of office. Egyptians do not have even that choice.
Freedom of Assembly & Speech as well as Habeas Corpus (a person's right to contest their unlawful detention) have no meaning there. Free elections (as defined by the UN) is a completely foreign concept to the current Egyptian regime. Human Rights, especially considering the newly appointed Vice President ran that country's rendition program, you can forget about it.
I'm sorry but the Egyptian people have every right to be pissed & demand change.
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In other news...
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This here is Rika. She was gracious enough to indulge me in what has been described as my Superman Fetish. :)
Feel free & comment away on any part of this if you so desire.
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Blaming everything on the Islamists is part of the far right militaristic strategy. Basically, the war on terror uses identical rhetoric to the Cold War: just search for ‘commies’ and replace with ‘Islamists.’ They don’t really believe in democracy or freedom. It’s just a convenient catchphrase to sell their bill of goods.
They feel validated in opposing democracy by pointing out that when the Israelis “gave” it to the Palestinians, they “betrayed” their overlords by electing a Hamas government in Gaza. They also point out that Lebanon’s democracy led to Hezbollah as a junior partner in their coalition government and then later being responsible for bringing down that government (legally of course but that doesn’t seem to matter).
Of course Islamists want the end of the Mubarak regime. But so does everyone else.
Here’s where the chickens are coming home to roost. We supported the secular dictatorships as a bullwark against Islamism. Because we were so tied to them, opposing the dictatorships and opposing the US became seen as one in the same. Because our client regimes suffocated secular opposition, Islamist opposition was the only kind allowed to develop. If we’d done more to press for the allowance of a secular opposition, there’d be a third way between regular dictatorship and the theocratic kind. But we never did. We always clung to the false dichotomy and now we’re paying for it.
We should’ve learned our lesson from Iran 1979 but of course we didn’t.
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