Protesters Blame U.S. for Mubarak's Rule
Eric Trager writes in the New York Daily News:
Last night, as the second day of popular demonstrations that have gripped huge chunks of downtown Cairo and beyond continued past dusk, a hundreds-strong crowd outside the Lawyers Syndicate suddenly swapped slogans.
After hours of chanting, "usqut, usqut ya Mubarak!" - "Fall, fall Mubarak!" - they turned their tongues toward another target: "Mubarak 'ameel American!" - "Mubarak is an American agent!"
It remains unclear where these demonstrations are heading and what their long-term implications will be. But there remains one long-term certainty: Someday, President Hosni Mubarak will either retire or die. And when this happens, he will leave behind approximately 80 million constituents, many of whom will blame the United States for backing his brutal rule even in its most unsympathetic moments.
And the blame game is already starting.
This is not to say that the United States tops the demonstrators' grievance list - the regime, which has ruled the country for 29 years, does, along with the many facets of its domestic repression. But in conversations, demonstrators routinely express their disapproval of the United States' longtime financial support for the very security forces that stand in the way of their freedom. They call the U.S. "arrogant," "disrespectful" and "hypocritical."
Many are particularly outraged by Secretary of State Clinton's statement on Tuesday calling for "all parties" to "exercise restraint," which drew intellectually insulting moral equivalence between mostly unarmed protesters and an armed-to-the-teeth police state.
Yet Clinton's remark, from which she later backtracked, cannot be assailed in isolation. It represents a continuation of nearly four decades of American foreign policy in Egypt, where successive administrations have backed dictators in the name of promoting regional stability - even as the Egyptian public has simmered.
Yes, as any realist theorist will explain, there were good reasons for doing this. A solitary leader who can keep his neighborhood quiet is easier to handle - or buy off - than a competitively elected, and therefore less predictable, government. Augusto Pinochet may be a bastard, the saying went about the Chilean dictator, but he's our bastard. And that makes him more reliable than a Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder - not to mention an elected Hamas leader - just about any day of the week.
But the urban tumult of the previous two days demonstrates that this thinking is perilously shortsighted. After all, nothing can be more unpredictable and destabilizing than the impending fall of a longtime dictator, particularly when that dictator has protected his seat by declining to choose a successor.
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