Please, Lord, Let Me be Wrong
Well, the Tsar has abdicated the throne, and seems headed into exile. Even his crown jewels, in Swiss bank accounts, have been seized and will be returned to the national treasury. The mutinous troops who would not fire on the crowd at the Winter Palace will soon be handing power to some sort of Constituent Assembly, which will elect the Egyptian Kerensky. And the world is all atwitter at the prospect of a despot giving way before the power of a crowd. It's people power! Power to the people! You'd think that Corozan Aquino or Vaclav Havel were waiting in the wings in Cairo to pick up the pieces of the fallen dictatorship, instead of the tightly disciplined cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood. I've previously compared this group to the Bolsheviks, but now I feel compelled to admit where I was wrong: the Bolsheviks in 1917 commanded the allegiance of only a tiny percentage of the population, and their vote total in Russia's first (and last) democratic election was dwarfed by that of the Socialist Revolutionaries. By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood is the only organized political alternative in Egypt--broadly popular, with an infrastructure of governance already in place. As Doug Schoen wrote for FoxNews:
According to the most recent data available, the Egyptian people are strongly favorable towards the Muslim Brotherhood. A study conducted in 2009 by WorldPublicOpinion.org shows that 64 percent have positive views of the Muslim Brotherhood, while just 16 percent have negative views. Nineteen percent said they have mixed views. An even larger majority, 69 percent, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood favors democracy. Just 22 percent believe they are too extreme and not genuinely democratic....
Secular parties have always done less well in Egypt, and the available evidence has consistently shown that there is little if any support for conventional, secular, democratic parties. And given the widespread disaffection with the current government and its performance, it is unlikely a candidate like current Vice President Omar Sulemain (who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt) and Prime Minister Safik could muster more than 10 percent to 15 percent of the vote. Nor is there any reason to believe that a candidate who runs and positions himself as a pro-western reformer, like former Foreign Minister and current Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa, or a candidate with any ties or links to the military like Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, would do appreciably better.
It is well to remember how Hosni Mubarak came to power: He was vice president when the moderate Anwar Sadat was murdered by Islamic extremists for making peace with Israel. Now that inchoate (and largely justified) public discontent has driven him out of power, the kind of men who murdered Anwar Sadat are the only ones prepared to take the reins. Some thirty years later, the assassins at last will be rewarded.
Perhaps it was inevitable. The old secular Arab nationalism Mubarak
represented was already played out. The model and ally that the Soviet
Union once provided the likes of Nasser and Saddam Hussein lies in the
dustbin of history. Without the galvanizing force of an enemy scapegoat,
nationalism has no place to go and nothing to do. In an Egypt at peace
with Israel, no longer pretending to marshal the forces of the whole
"Arab nation" against the "Zionist enemy," the military had no apparent
purpose except to repress the population. To plagiarize Seinfeld,
Egypt has an "army about nothing." Or it did, until this week. We will
see in the next few years if that army finds a new purpose, as the
Iranian army did in 1979, when a secular despot gave way to a popular
revolution. A Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government would prove the
best friend Hamas and Hezbollah ever had, and might even provoke a
conventional confrontation with Israel--which would end in a series of
mushroom clouds, with hundreds of thousands dead.... Pardon me if I
don't share in this week's champagne toasts, offered by Israelophobes
like Scott McConnell.
The Egyptian masses have taken hold of the rhetoric of democracy and liberalism, to the point where Mubarak's old allies were too embarrassed to try and keep him in power. Our own political systems are legitimated by such slogans, and we are too egalitarian to admit that these concepts work only in a narrow range of cultural conditions. When Western countries pulled out of colonial Africa and Asia, the result was in most cases drearily predictable: "One man, one vote, one time." In nations with no history of constitutional protections, with religious majorities that are openly intolerant, minorities fare much worse than they do under "enlightened" despots or colonial regimes. The list of such groups that were brutally repressed is long and dispiriting: The Tutsis in Rwanda, the whites in Zimbabwe, the Christians in Iraq, the Serbs in Kosovo.... The track record of modern Jacobin democracy gives us no reason to treasure much hope for the Christians of Egypt. I hope that Western countries will be generous in granting them asylum. They will need it.
I fear that the failure of Mubarak to arrange for an orderly, undemocratic succession that would keep the Muslim Brotherhood where it belongs--firmly beneath the iron heel of a secular state--will cost far more Arab lives in the long run than it would have cost to repress the riots. I hope that I am proved wrong. I desperately hope that one or two years from now a free election produces a tolerant state, where 10 percent of the members of Egypt's parliament are Christian, half are women, and the country is still at peace with Israel. I hope that "Roland Shirk" becomes a byword in the blogosphere for pointless alarmism and needless, Machiavellian pessimism, that my columns concerning Egypt sound as silly as Reagan-era fears that a post-apartheid South Africa would turn into a Soviet satellite. I don't need to be vindicated by history. I would much, much rather be wrong.


