Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Egypt standoff (click to view)
Date: February 2, 2011
Now entering its second week, the political crisis in Egypt continues shows no sign of settling down. President Mubarak has appointed a new prime minister and has promised not to "run" in his country's next "election," but has still refused to concede to the protestors' clearest and most urgent demand — that he step aside
immediately.
The Obama administration's response to the situation thus far been an exceedingly delicate dance, highlighting the complex role that Egypt plays in American foreign policy. On the one hand, Mubarak is clearly a dictator yadda yadda, but on the other, he also heads a government that is the US' second-biggest recipient of foreign aid — a billion or so a year, to cite the number I've been hearing thrown around. General Mubarak gets this money because of his amicable relationship with foreign aid recipient #1, Israel, whom America has sworn to protect from nasty neighbours. And as I mentioned in the previous day's toon, there is currently a great deal of fear that any protestor-backed government that may eventually arise to replace Mubarak may very well be of a much more Islamist character than his present secular, military-backed regime — and thus may hold high potential to "destabilize the region," which is Washington-speak for "might bomb Israel."
Clearly mindful of such anxieties, in the first few days of the riots, Obama and his State department took a very conservative line, and refused to call outright for Mubarak's resignation, instead stressing that
everyone should show "restraint.". But equally mindful of America's need to be on the right side of the democratic cause, they simultaneously conceded that the anti-government folks in the street were clearly expressing valid concerns, too, and that maybe Muby should get off his pyramid and do something about it.
What exactly the White House is expecting the dictator to do has gotten gradually clearer over the last few days, as Obama and company seem to edge closer and closer to siding with the protesters outright. The appointment of a new prime minister and vice president was essentially laughed off by Hillary Clinton, who is now using the fairly opaque, but still decisive, phrase "orderly transition to democracy" to describe what she wants from Mubarak.
From the perspective of Mr. Obama's more liberal supporters, this has hardly been the President's shining hour. Given the chance to take an unequivocal, anti-dictatorial stance, Obama instead retreated into pragmatic,
realpolitik mode, evoking memories of President Reagan's uneasy response to the 1986 riots that pushed US-backed Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos from power. In the realm of foreign policy, Obama is not a man who puts knee-jerk ideology before American interests, we now clearly know.
To say this has been a huge controversy for the prez would be a gross misnomer, however. The American right, for the most part, has not blasted Obama much either way. While in more conventional times the Republicans might have been natural proponents of the "he's our S.OB." school of thought towards US-friendly dictators, in the year 2011 they're now bound by the eight year precedent of George W. Bush, who repeatedly described the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East as the highest priority of his presidency. And though the gentile left may be a bit perturbed that Obama's supposedly progressive foreign policy is just "more of the same," pro-Israeli Jews are still a prominent enough constituency in the Democratic Party to keep internal dissent under control.
Regardless, it's now looking increasingly likely that Mubarak is on his way out sooner rather than later. Whether or not Obama did everything he could to accelerate that inevitability, the whole episode may still prove to help, rather than harm his political reputation in the long run. After all, the words that have been most widely used to describe his administration's response — careful, measured, moderate, pragmatic — are very much the sorts of labels he's been most eager to court in the run-up to 2012.
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