Until the United States discards the complexes it developed during the Cold War, which made it imperative for the country to search for and support individual rulers and political leaders as "allies", instead of the countries themselves, it will continue to stagger from one of these kinds of crises for its foreign policy, to another.
At the core of the notion of the individual ruler as an ally is a value system that is actually inimical to everything the United States should stand for: a value system that abjures popular sovereignty. Mubarak could not be an ally of the United States. Egypt has always been the real ally. American officials should always keep that in mind, if they are to effectively sell the message of popular sovereignty and American support for its underlining values to the world.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
--- On Sun, 1/30/11, Mr. Seyi Olu Awofeso
From: Mr. Seyi Olu Awofeso
Obama’s riddle: withdraw or keep military aid?By Bill Emmott
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America must stay unequivocally on the side of freedom and reform. That means making a break with the past
It is a sobering thought, for any European or American prone to proselytising for democracy and human rights, that this month’s events in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab dictatorships have had so little apparent connection to anything the West does or says. It is even a tad embarrassing that it is al-Jazeera, a broadcaster backed by the dictators of Qatar, that has been closed down first in Egypt and not the BBC or CNN.
That embarrassment is, however, as nothing compared with the fact that the rulers being overthrown were previously known as our “strategic allies”. We did little to bring them down — at least Hosni Mubarak has so far paid no heed to the phone calls he has had from Barack Obama and David Cameron, urging him to democratise Egypt — and yet so far we seem to have escaped direct blame for the rulers’ past sins. However, if that immunity from blame lasts it will be, shall we say, quite surprising.
Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps WikiLeaks’ revelations of America’s honest view of the Tunisian dictator’s venality and incompetence have played a part; perhaps, a loyal US spokesman might now say, the tough speech in Doha, the Qatari capital, on January 13 by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, warning Arab governments that unless they reformed they would be in danger, might have caused a few ripples; perhaps the European Union’s “Barcelona Process” of talks with the other side of the Mediterranean over trade and aid amid muffled mumbles about political development made some minute difference. We don’t and can’t know. Like Mr Mubarak right now, we need to be humble about our own powerlessness.
We shouldn’t, admittedly, be too self-deprecatory about this. Revolutions have always happened in unpredictable ways at unpredictable times, making it impossible to say with any certainty why the crowds formed and the necessary sense of collective bravery emerged in one country at one time and not in another country at another time.
Contagion helps, and so does the dissemination of information about how an overthrow was organised, whether by internal groups, by outside lobbies such as the International Centre on Non-Violent Conflict in New York, or just through Western media coverage.
The main tool by which we can promote democracy and other freedoms is by our own conduct and example. The trouble is, that also includes our conduct towards the dictators. Everyone knows about realpolitik, and most accept the need to do deals even with people we view with distaste, for ever risking accusations of double standards. But realpolitik leaves a trail that is likely to be exposed eventually: in a revolution, the archives are thrown open, previously silent people talk, and in an atmosphere of recrimination people look for culprits.
As that happens, in Egypt’s case especially, the West is at serious risk of becoming a target for militant groups, a focus for new sorts of nationalism even amid a move to democracy, if or (we hope) when the Mubarak regime does fall.
