Tryannies are Toppling across the Middle East--Could the US be Next?

Egypt has thrown off a tyrannical regime.  When will we topple ours?

I'm not talking about President Obama; He's just a cog in the machine.  I'm referring to this large bureaucratic regime, this clanking soul-draining monster, this federal, state and municipal steamroller that is built, fed and operated by the statists of all parties.

Egypt's situation is fundamentally different than ours, for we do not suffer under a military dictatorship, but read this excerpt and broadly replace references to "military" with "bureaucracy," and you'll see what I'm talking about...

The democratic wave that has finally struck the Arab world is, among other things, a civilian protest movement against the militarization of Middle Eastern life. Old Oriental despotisms, for all their unpleasantness, did not fundamentally assault the civilian nature of Muslim societies, where men of the cloth, letters, the bazaar, and small-town aristocracies defined the “good and noble.”

Robbed of ideology and military purpose (defeating Israel became a millenarian dream, like the ancient Arab aspiration to conquer Constantinople), Arab armies became instruments of political oppression and private enrichment. (Reuel Marc Gerecht - Weekly Standard)

The tyranny we groan and strain under is a bureaucratic one
FDR built a civilian statist army back in the 1930's and put it on war footing.  Government was supposed to wage war on poverty, ignorance and those on the outside attacking us and our way of life.  Instead, it now fosters poverty and ignorance and joins in the  multicultural jihad against our borders, language and culture (Yes, I got that from Doc Savage).

This out of control government that cannot manage its own finances nonetheless lectures us on what we should eat and how we should live.  It incompetently stumbles and bumbles its way through international diplomacy and blows hundreds of billions on intelligence, only to be surprised when a friendly dictator is toppled.  Meanwhile, domestic surveillance of innocent citizens increases.

Fighting Citizens is Easier than Fighting Criminals
Governments across the spectrum have found fighting crime and improving the lives of its citizens too challenging, so it now turns on them, spies on them, regulates and scolds them.  America's army of bureaucrats long ago turned on the people it was supposed to serve, and like the Egyptian Army, enjoys its perks and will not give them up willingly.

Real criminals with real guns are robbing and killing in Denver, but the Jefferson County DA goes after a kid with an airsoft gun.  This is just one story in an avalanche of government-sponsored outrages and abuse.  The EPA demanding dairy farmers treat milk spills as hazardous waste, and calling the dust they kick up "pollution" adds to the bonfire of regulatory stupidities now raging against the job-providers in this country. Our unemployment is government-induced.

Fighting criminals and protecting borders is hard; it's so much easier and satisfying to turn the power of the state against the people.  Government is everywhere.  They have robbed us of the private nature of our lives and our societies.

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
-Plato

Can We Learn to let it Burn?

 
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

America's Choice: Rotten Dictator or Islamists?

President Obama exercising a time-worn American tradition

All this Egypt stuff is giving me Latin America flashbacks.  I saw some pretty violent stuff down there.  Almost getting killed by Cubans dressed as locals was just one of the many close calls...

Anyway, I caught some Sean Hannity with a couple of blathering Muslim women on his show arguing over which was better, a soul-snuffing dictatorship or a liberty-hating Islamist regime. Sean took the side of the dictatorship.

With Friends like the Saudis and the Egyptians...

"We've got to prop up the Saudi autocracy and the Egyptian dictatorship," goes the logic.  "If Islamists take over, we'll be attacked by fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt."  Uh.... On 9/11 we were attacked by Islamists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, so that pretty much blows that logic.

Why can't America simply stand for liberty?
If the Jordanians or Algerians end up electing Muslim head-cutters, so what?  It's their choice, and hopefully they'll learn from it.  If the people can overthrow a Stalinist dictatorship, they can overthrow a theocracy.  And as I previously mentioned, we've already seen how effective our Saudi and Egyptian "friends" are at containing their own poison.

We should simply be on the side of liberty.  We can trade with anyone and everyone, but let's stop getting in bed with evil people.  So violent extremists take over Saudi Arabia and Kuwait...  What the hell do I care?  They've got to sell the damned oil to survive, so let's drop the crap about "securing the world's oil supply."

And would it have killed Obama to say ONE DAMNED WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE IRANIAN PROTESTERS LAST YEAR?

It's sickening watching the Obama administration's balancing act.  VP Biden insists Dictator for life Mubarack is not a dictator, and Hillary calls the dictator and his wife "close family friends," while the New York Times frets that this looks bad for President Obama since he launched his US apology to the Muslim world from Egypt.  The liberal press also worries that the contagion is spreading across the entire Muslim world.  I say, GOOD!

A Dysfunctional Umma

"The worst psychological state is a superiority complex coupled with an inferior status."
--Jagdish Bhagwati, economist

Let the whole damned boiling cauldron of hatred burn!  The whole fragging place needs a cleansing.  I've been there, I know.  It all needs to be tipped over, spilled out and flushed down the sewer.  What a rotten, stinking hellhole these red-faced, inflamed boils on the ass of global society have created for themselves.  Ordinarily, no one would care about the shit-smeared house of horrors the spawn of Ishmael have created, but the murderous lunatics keep escaping and creating bloody havoc in the civilized parts of the world.  It's time for a cleansing, and we need to get the hell out of the way. 

I started by mentioning the death and destruction I had witnessed in Central and South America.  For all of Latin America's problems, at least they know how to use toilet paper and keep decapitations to the absolute bare minimum.  Latin Americans can also face up to their past and learn from it.  Muslims are still living in a dream world that never was.

The Muslim world must come to grips with its systemic dysfunction and utter failure.  Only then can they get past it all and try to build a future.  We are not helping by propping up hate states.  They live in a festering sewer, and we shower them with billions to carpet it over and buy air fresheners to mask the stench.  Time to step back and let reality take its course.

Afterthought:  I wrote this last nigh and it looks harsh in the light of day, but I stand by it.  All I can add is that their are millions of good people in the Muslim world yearning to breath free. There are also millions of bad people dedicated to making sure that doesn't happen.  Who's side are we on?