Since there are few things that amuse me more than insane people, I love watching Glenn Beck. And Mr. Beck has been in rare form since the protests that finally toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak began 19 days ago.
It's a conspiracy, you see. It's a conspiracy to "end the western way of life in the Middle East", which is interesting insofar as the Middle East isn't a part of the West to begin with. The conspiracy is driven by Islamists, socialists, communists and community organizers. Oh, and I almost forgot, Google executives! On Wednesday, Glen played video of President Obama commenting that "young people have banded together to demand change", at which point the camera returns to Beck, who declares "Wasn't that your slogan, Mr. President?" So the president of the United States is complicit in the conspiracy to end the western way of life in a place that isn't the West.
I don't care if Beck's ratings drop to zero, I'm never going to stop watching because this is the funniest fucking thing I've ever heard. This is so balls-out crazy that even Bill O'Reilly isn't dumb enough to take it seriously. And O'Reilly is plenty dumb.
On the other hand, there are no shortage of columnists and bloggers who are with Beck, if not on the particulars, in saying that Egyptian democracy movement is a negative thing. That they were doing so at the very same time that they were embedding President Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech on every flat surface they could find is one of the most ironically hilarious things I've ever seen.
Here's something that most of those folks don't understand. "Tear down this wall" was actually a pretty easy thing for Reagan to say. Since the liberation of eastern Europe and the end of communism had official American policy for forty years at that point, the speech required little, if any, actual courage.
What would have been courageous is if Reagan and his acolytes applied their love of liberty as equally to their friends as they did the communist governments of the world. None of those people had anything at all to say about two-legged monsters like Augusto Pinochet. They only supported the overthrow of a beast like Ferdinand Marcos when it became clear that it was going to happen with or without American approval.
Freedom loving Americans like Beck and O'Reilly - along with about 90% of the blogosphere - don't like to talk about the animals that they've taken to their collective bosoms since 1945. They don't mention that they remain shy about admitting their silence in the face of their Indonesian ally Suhato's genocide in East Timor, or that they engineered coups against democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala and sponsored the criminal governments they installed for decades. Nor do they acknowledge the plot to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende, although there were no documented ties between the CIA and the successful coup that Pinochet headed.
Worse, when President Obama merely alludes to these things, those people accuse him of undermining America. What they don't understand is that U.S post-war policy essentially undermined itself, along with American credibility in large swaths of the world. More importantly, it created some of the challenges that it faces today. The great Dan Carlin did an hour-long Common Sense this week in which he said "When you support the Shah over Mossedegh, you get the Ayatollah." That's just as true as the U.S-Pakistani-Saudi-Chinese support for the anti-Soviet jihad creating the modern Taliban and al-Qaeda was.
I understand concepts like "national interest" and "foreign policy realism" better than most. However, I also understand how those things fly in the face of American rhetoric about democracy, liberty and national self-determination. That hypocrisy rightly enrages people like the protesters in Tahir Square and it's not hard to see how. People like Glenn Beck saw chaos and civil war in Iraq and called it democracy, while opposing the non-violent protests in Egypt.
I actually agree with Beck and O'Reilly when the say that Egyptian army's takeover of the government was the best possible outcome. That said, I hope that it remains in place longer than the September deadline for elections. If it doesn't, the odds of democracy flourishing in Egypt decrease to almost nothing.
Before it does anything else, Egypt needs to re-write large sections of its constitution before successful elections can be held. The 29 year state of emergency that was imposed after the assassination of Anwar Sadat will have be lifted. And the one thing that Egypt is going to need more than anything else is time. And six months isn't going to be enough time.
Democracy cannot be created in a vacuum and only rarely can it sprout up, fully formed overnight. When you criminalize political parties, only criminals will have political parties. Even if the Muslim Brotherhood is the most moderate, peace-loving faction on earth, they're the only group organized enough to be expected to stand for election right now. That's probably not going to change by September.
For liberty to succeed, Egyptians need a real choice when elections are held. That's going to take time and the army is uniquely positioned to do that. If they demonstrate that they'll tolerate free assembly - which they did this month - and open political organizing, I believe that the protesters won't hold them to the self-imposed six month limit on their rule. If they don't, Cairo is right back where it started and there could be a counter-coup, which definitely won't end well.
More than anything, the United States, the European Union and Israel need to shut up. If emerging Egyptian political movements start hearing outsiders opine on what they will and will not find "acceptable", it only stands to reason that those movements are going to campaign against the outsiders. The West and Israel can certainly help the Egyptian army create a democratic infrastructure, but it cannot be seen as taking sides.
This is an incredibly delicate time, particularly since it's possible that these protest movements might spread and topple other governments in the region. But we need to remember that the people of the Middle East are incredibly sensitive to foreign interference in their politics, having suffered it for well over a century now.
Having said that, while insane conspiracy theories broadcast on global television aren't especially helpful to that process, they're endlessly entertaining to watch.
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