I'm So Glad Hillary Clinton Isn't President

Remembering the fiasco of the Iranian revolution under Carter, my feeling is that the American response to the streets of Cairo could have been very bad.

And I think (as I pointed out in an earlier post) that Obama has been pretty forthright in our support of the burgeoning democracy in Egypt (which is, right now, actually a military dictatorship but er, hopefully that's just a technicality.)

From the New York Times:

With restive crowds of young Egyptians demanding President Hosni Mubarak’s immediate resignation, Frank G. Wisner, Mr. Obama’s envoy to Cairo, had just told a Munich conference that Mr. Mubarak was indispensable to Egypt’s democratic transition.
Mr. Obama was furious, and it did not help that his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Wisner’s key backer, was publicly warning that any credible transition would take time — even as Mr. Obama was demanding that change in Egypt begin right away.

If that's true, I'm glad Mr. Obama was furious. He should be. We don't need idiots like Dick Cheney mumbling about how Mubarak has been such a good friend to the United States. And we don't need Hillary Clinton trying to maintain the status quo in the Middle East. Which is something she has had a dangerous tendency to do.

The Neo-Con dream of foisting democracy
1. cheaply, and
2. at the end of a gun,
3. as long as the ideology of the government is appropriate,

just doesn't work. You can only pick two of those things. Sometimes you don't even get two of them. Germany and Japan were certainly forced democracies. Marching our armies into their countries was incredibly expensive. We're still occupying those countries. And actually, they have been allowed some freedom in selecting their own governments. Even MacArthur allowed the Japanese to select a Socialist cabinet (albeit for only a year.)

Velvet revolutions are perhaps rare. But soldiers can, and have, stuck flowers in their guns. And when they do, dear Lord, don't do anything to stop them.