Eliot Abrams made a good point on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America. We are not worried about “the people” taking over Egypt when Mubarrak falls; we are worried about the Muslim Brotherhood taking over
The dictators we prop up in exchange for their cooperation end up suppressing the people, not the dangerous organizations we hope to guard against. They squander the breathing room we buy for them, snuffing freedom and giving oxygen to freedom’s enemies.
84% of Egyptians support killing apostates
There is a liberal-conservative tug-of-war going on over the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. Are they terrorists, or are they benign? Given the results of Egyptian public opinion polls, this is an irrelevant question. Caroline Glick injects some reality into the discussion:
According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics.
Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion. ( Caroline Glick)Take the Muslim Brotherhood out of the question, and Egypt is still a scary society. And those trumpeting the announced partnership between the secular El Baredei and the Muslim brotherhood need to remember a similar partnership in Iran. The clerics joined with the academic left to topple the Shah, then slit their throats and unleashed the Islamic brown shirts once the revolution was won.
It's a crazy world over there and we don't understand it, so why pick winners and losers?
We cannot make Middle Easterners love the US and our western-style freedoms. We don’t even share an understanding of what our basic human rights are. Our attempts to win them to our side have failed. They’ve got to come around on their own. If they must pass through 100 years of darkness to realize they are wrong, then so be it.
Our further presence there will only bias and distort the decisionmaking of ordinary people. Time for us to abandon these miserable societies to their miserable fate.
Neocon Nightmare or a Come to Jesus Moment?
Neocons and foreign policy realists make a compelling case for staying engaged and even for supporting rotten tyrannical regimes. There are no good solutions. But let's stop and ask what would happen if we abandon the Middle East. Maybe it will burn if we leave, slide into chaos, or rot in hell, who knows? Maybe China will step in to protect its interests.
Maybe the Middle East will melt down. Maybe it needs a meltdown that will destroy the old dysfunctional order once and for all. The cognitive dissonance caused by an inflated sense superiority while inhabiting a cultural toilet has driven the Umma to the brink. A drunk needs to land in the gutter before he realizes he needs to change. Nations and cultures are no different.
What about US?
The most important question is not what will happen to this region and its hordes of of bug-eyed America-hating fanatics, but what are the consequences for us and our national security? How would the cost/benefit ledger settle out if we completely disengaged?
Would it spell disaster for us? Or would it force cowardly governments inside and outside the region to grow up and shoulder some responsibility? Perhaps we have vital interests in the region, but we're not the only ones. Time to force the other players to turn over their cards and face reality.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028255.php
Christopher Hitchens - Shame
