YOU BREAK IT YOU BOUGHT IT…

A friend and I are corresponding about the situation in Egypt. I thought you might be interested in a redacted form of my end of the correspondence. This is the first of these that will wind up as blog posts:

1/28/11

Okay, maybe it’s just my usual “always look on the dark side of life” approach, but I think this is big, and bad, news. I wonder why it took the market so long to react; are the guys who make the really big money too busy watching “Dancing with the Stars” to notice what’s going on outside their narrowest definition of the financial world?

This is serious business because it has the potential to spread this type of thing through the whole Arab world and, even if it didn’t, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, and Egypt (especially Egypt, the most populous Arab country) are enough. While Tunisia’s opposition is primarily secular and Yemen was such a mess before this latest series of episodes that it doesn’t make much difference, Egypt is especially problematical because it is not only big but also has a substantial radical Islamist element (the Muslim Brotherhood) playing a big role in the opposition. Further, it’s right on Israel’s border and is the only Arab country.other than Jordan, that has a formal peace agreement with Israel.

There are those (and I hope, but in my cynical way, doubt, that their numbers are small) who will, in their narrow little way, say that there’s nothing to worry about because no substantial oil producers involved. To this we can only say “not yet” and that we hope that those who make this argument realize that there is more at stake here than oil and pure economics. The potential tumult would be a disaster from both the geopolitical and humanitarian standpoints.

The problems in Egypt and Tunisia, which qualify in some quarters as staunch U.S. allies, also give the lie to the Bush/Obama administration’s ongoing protestations that they are for “democracy” in the Middle East while they sweat bullets over their preferred thugs being under siege or, in the case of Tunisia, already having left the country. It’s realpolitik, and I understand it. But why do these guys have to be so hypocritical in their pious protestations that they are for democracy and freedom? They are looking out for American interests, in their own twisted way. There is nothing wrong with looking out for American interests; I just wish they did so more effectively and a lot less intrusively, employing perhaps five minutes of thought before so ham-handedly inserting themselves into every situation in every country that can be remotely portrayed as being important to us. We may be on the verge of having made a whole list of new enemies in the Middle East as people express their resentment against the thugs we have installed, or at least supported. Sometimes thuggishness is necessary; indeed, now we are starting to see why Saddam Hussein was not the Arab world’s version of Mr. Rogers. But we don’t have to explicitly support such thugs, only later to toss them over the side when their continued reign conflicts with our sensitivities. Perhaps we’d be better off just keeping our noses out of other countries’ business.