The resignation on Friday of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarek confirms at least three of the great lessons of history--and human behavior. Lesson the first: the forces of reaction are often at their most virulent and loudest insistence immediately before they collapse in the face of true popular sentiment. Less than a day before Mubarek officially resigned, he said he wasn't going to go--at least, not before the scheduled elections in September.
This leads directly to point the second: people in the know should keep their mouths shut. CIA Director Leon Panetta told a Congressional committee on Thursday that Mubarek would be leaving on Thursday night. In his speech Thursday night, as has been noted, Mubarek said he was not going. I suspect Mubarek's original plan was to announce his resignation on Thursday night, but once the word got out about Panetta's testimony, Mubarek decided he did not want to leave with even a whiff of a hint that he was going at the behest of the United States. I'm willing to bet (and I do not gamble) that Mubarek would confirm, if asked, that if Panetta had kept his mouth shut, Mubarek would in fact have announced his resignation on Thursday night, instead of denying it Thursday and waiting until Friday to make it. The man held a lot of power for a long time; he has his pride. I do not have to agree with him or with his policies to understand why he'd not want to be seen as jumping instantly on the heels of some American governmental official saying "jump."
Point the third: supporting dictators who are friendly to American foreign policy objectives, just because they are friendly to American foreign policy objectives, is NOT a wise idea. That the "Egyptian Revolution" has so far been mostly peaceful is more a matter of luck than design, for we weren't so much supportive of Mubarek as we were of Egypt's peaceful coexistence with Israel. We've been giving Egypt a lot of foreign and military aid and training (as has much of western Europe) in exchange for Egypt's maintaining the peace treaty with Israel--which came in under Anwar Sadat. Mubarek, of course, took power upon Sadat's assassination, and it's lucky for us that he saw the wisdom in Sadat's having signed the peace treaty in the first place.
To say that this change in Egypt is bad for America is to make many unwarranted assumptions, and even to fly in the face of America's long-term and oft-stated foreign policy goal of making real representative democracy the world-wide norm for governments. One of the things the radical right never seems to grasp is that genuine representative democracy is not ONLY for "people who think like we do and who agree with us." The radical right usually expresses itself on this score by telling capital-D Democrats to "love it or leave it" (or whatever the 21st century equivalent of that sentiment is). What the radial right doesn't seem to understand is that true representative democracy is risky--because it means that there's a real chance that people who DON'T think "just like us" can come to power. The beauty of real, American-style representative democracy is that EVERYBODY involved, even those who don't "think just like us" agrees that the system works, and that even when out of power, those who don't "think like us" still participate, that elections are held regularly, and that transitions of power are peaceful . . . and that the pendulum will swing in both directions as long as we all agree that the system works and that we ALL have a vital interest in maintaining the system. After all, "We the People" ARE the government in this system, and if a genuine majority says it wants something, it should have it.
I wish Egypt well. Recent events there and in Tunisia may mark the beginning of something wonderful for the entire world.
