"Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the rounds on all five Sunday shows," reports The Hill, "advocating that the people's voice be heard while taking care not to call for a departure of President Hosni Mubarak." A familiar play, Act One.
Scene two, however, was previewed on one of those shows by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: Mubarak should "accept the reality" of his hopeless situation and resign.
It's always unclear precisely which hope against what other hope autocrats such as Mubarak envision. The entire world knows this play's denouement -- and it's for damn sure Hillary Clinton does -- yet there dithers the Egyptian president, abjectly alone, without any substantial base of support, cities burning, allies feeling, friends forgetting his phone number. Even "his" military is an adder in waiting.
I'm no psychologist, but reason suffices in assuming that 30 years of obsessive control and unopposed rule at some point transform the lone controller into a kind of fantasy-ruler: this -- the wretched breakdown of all that so meticulously came before -- cannot really be happening to him, "the people" will come to their adoring senses and love him again, some miraculous intervention is sure to occur ...
To stretch a not-entirely outrageous analogy, the sort of delusional otherworld into which Herr Hitler escaped during his final days ... FDR ist tot? ... Gott ist mit mir.
Accept the reality. A simple enough exhortation, especially when inevitability has already swallowed every conceivable alternative -- which makes Western angst over Mubarak's immediate decisions seem a bit unwarranted.
Of course the difference with Egypt as opposed to Algeria or going back to the Green revolution of Iran, is that our 30 years of aid give us leverage with the Mubarak regime.
As easy as it appears that the US should tell Mubarak to hand over the country and let Suleiman or the military oversee an interim government until the fall elections, I think there's a very limited audience complicating that conversation.
People like King Abdullah of Jordan. I bet he's really interested to see how the Obama administration deals with this. (The US doesn't really like to talk about how they pushed the Native Americans off the continent, either.)
Posted by: JS | January 30, 2011 at 05:58 PM