I belatedly checked DKos earlier today to check what's up and saw the title of what was then the top-recommended diary, "Yo, MB, cut the crap!" It was inconceivable to me that a Meteor Blades callout would be top rated (and yes, I did get it after reading through), so I immediately wondered who "MB" was: Milton Bradley? Oh, Michele Bachman! But in between was a fleeting thought: "Are people now abbreviating 'Mubarek' as 'MB'?"
"Yo, Mubarek, cut the crap!" is largely today's collective response to developments in Egypt. It's foreseeable, understandable, appropriate -- and highly unsatisfying. Since there's little we plebes can actually do right now to shape the direction of the ongoing protests in Egypt, this may be a good moment to step back and consider the question: "why do we cooperate with dictators?"
We have very good reasons to do so -- and those very good reasons are, of course, also very bad reasons. To understand our nation's (or any powerful nation's) role in this, we have to confront them.
This next bit won't stand tough scrutiny, I'm sure, but it's good enough to serve as a general guideline:
In political activity, whether officially in a party or unofficially in a revolutionary moment, there are basically three sorts of people. First, those who sit on the sidelines. Second, those who primarily want to fight for their principles (whether coherent or diffuse, broad-minded or parochial). Third, those who are primarily out for power after the dust settles.
The first group doesn't much matter. Those in the second group -- whether phone-bankers or Argentine grandmothers demonstrating to find the locations of their disappeared children or marchers in Selma or Egyptians facing down riot police or anything else -- are admirable (to the extent that their aims are admirable.) The third group are (even when their aims are admirable) somewhat unsettling -- and when their aims are not admirable they are truly frightening.
The second group is larger than the third. The third group, though, has great advantages over the second: it knows exactly what it wants and it often has plans to get it. While the second group may exult in the victory, the third group is already having new keys made to the Presidential Palace and changing the locks.
In politics large and small, we have to deal with grasping and ambitious people. Frankly, they are the ones who will tend to be in power whoever wins, because they are more intent on gaining power than in the glories of social change. Some of these people are not only decent, but excellent. They will be in a position to implement the social changes that those of us in the second group (and yes, I include myself there) want. Some of these people have no fixed ideology, but are willing to listen and will calculate whether activists can help them sufficiently more than large contributors (or, in the case of a revolution, generals and police captains) to be worth attention and inclusion.
A horrible truth in politics is that you need to ally with such people in order to successfully attain the power to do what's good. They're all about success. They care about it more than you do.
An even more horrible truth in politics on the international level is that some of these people become dictators.
And, horribly, if you want to do something good on the international stage -- and I do not argue here that that is always or even usually the primary motive of the U.S., though I think we do many good things -- you're going to have to deal with them.
If you decide that you're not going to deal with Mubarek, and Putin, and Hu, and the Saudi royals, and Ahmedinejad, and the list goes on -- you're not going to get things done. (Some things, like extraordinary rendition, would be better not gotten done. Others, like international public health and environmental efforts, are quite worthwhile.)
That's just how it is. That's why even good people will do it.
Egypt has helped us do some good things (keeping Suez open) and bad ones (extraordinary rendition) and we have helped it do some good things (peace efforts) and bad (internal repression).
Someone like Mubarek is more interested in power than in policy. In his case, his intention to pass on power to his son, as Assad did in Syria, seems to be what really set people off: it's one thing to wait for a dictator for an aged dictator to die and quite another to reset the clock.
Getting a dictator to do good things is a delicate operation because the first thing the dictator cares about is maintaining power. Assure that -- and the U.S. has done so for over thirty years -- and you can get them to do some good things as well. (It's similar, by the way, in domestic politics, where the Mayor may do what you want so long as you help with re-election.) So, to get good things to happen, you first end up contributing to repression.
Your doing so, of course, means that you are pissing off people in the second and the third groups for, in this case, literally decades, allowing the pressure in the cooker to build. And then there comes a time when it builds so high that regime change becomes possible. From there, it can happen (Poland, Tunisia) or not happen (China, Iran). What an external political actor who cares mostly about maintaining power with respect to the group in question -- as we as a national actor do -- does in that situation becomes ludicrous: we say that we want to be friends with everybody and especially with whoever ends up in the Presidential Palace. And of course we want everyone to be nice.
"Nice" is nice -- but this isn't going to fool anyone. People may not point out the ludicrousness for their own reasons (they may want our support), but one thing it clearly does is to inform dictators -- in the unlikely event that they didn't realize it before -- that We Who Have Propped Them Up are not actually bosom allies. (I think that Marcos, for example, must have been shocked when the U.S. decided not to keep propping him up. Noriega probably still can't figure out what happened to him. Diem didn't get to think about it for very long.)
The problem for us is that the ones who spearheaded this revolution -- those wonderful, admirable students who care deeply about human and political rights -- are relatively unlikely to be the ones in the Presidential Palace (or its equivalent, if it gets burned down), assuming that Mubarek ends up elsewhere. It's more likely to be someone from the Army or sympathetic police forces, perhaps behind a Cory Aquino-style political figurehead. Or it will be a reformer who is among but not of the protesters, like Mohammed El-Baradei -- but he doesn't seem to be avaricious enough to seize power or popular enough, like Nelson Mandela was, to be the obvious choice after a negotiated withdrawal. Or it will be someone from a true opposition group -- truly opposed to us -- like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose belated entry into events may explain the fires. Some of these events are better than what Egypt has had now; the last of them, in my opinion, is worse. (Better to live in Egypt than Iran.) That's the game we're going to be playing, once the decision is made (as may have already occurred) that Mubarek is doomed.
What I would like to see the U.S. do in these situations, from a purely moral point of view, is to both help foreign countries do good things where possible and to let their leaders know that we will be ready to embrace regime change and reform when its populace demands it (or maybe even if they don't.) The problem is -- and we (including me) have to face this -- is that this is often impossible. Whatever aid we provide -- money to allow the regime to continue to stay in power comes off the top. We may make them promise otherwise, they may go ahead and promise otherwise, but they generally won't do otherwise. So what I'd like -- and what you'd probably like -- often won't be realistic, and everyone knows it.
There's no good answer to this. I wish that it were easier, but it's never going to be. The only thing for us to do, aside from hoping for what is best with the least bloodshed and most justice, is to remind people who thought that we could ride this tiger indefinitely that they were idiots. We can recognize that the situation has no good solution, but we had damn well better recognize that "no good solution" includes the solution of continuing to prop up dictators, in the hope that it will last forever. Deal with the possibilities honestly and rationally at and least we -- in our nation and beyond -- can have a more intelligent discussion about international relations.
Update -- since it apparently wasn't clear enough for some, I'm presenting and acknowledging the truth present within the "realpolitik" position while also pointing out that these "truths" are partial and unsatisfying -- because events like this are inevitable and our prior actions constrain what we can do in the name of good at times like this. Note the tip jar.
I'm off for a weekend in the Bay area, so that's about it for me here. Thanks for taking part!