1979 Redux?

The Obama administration’s deer-in-the headlights policy toward Egypt will probably change if and when Mubarak & Co. leave and thereby introduce the risk of a Czar–Kerensky–Lenin or Estates-General–Paris Commune–Committee of Public Safety scenario — i.e., the better organized and militantly non-democratic forces coming to the fore amid loosely organized protest against prior oppression.

Any “unity” government with the anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood as a member is de facto a route to an Islamic Republic and a hostile Egypt for years to come — a veritable Libya, Syria, or Iran on steroids. We should remember just how much Nasser and, later, a pro-Soviet early Sadat stymied U.S. interests. Certainly Mubarak’s Egypt is no more Western or modern than was the Shah’s Iran, where the unlikely return to the pre-modern world soon became accepted. The thing that stopped Iraq from going the way of Iran (e.g., Saddam–Allawi–Zarqawi, like Shah–Banisadr–Khomeini) was, in large part, constant and vocal support for constitutional government and nothing but — and the skill of the U.S. military.

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