Has Egypt’s turmoil divided the neocons? Our Quote of the Day comes from The Jewish Daily Forward’s bureau chief in Washington, D.C, Nathan Guttman, in an article that needs to be read in full. Here’s the beginning:
After once uniting to support regime change in Iraq through an American military invasion, neoconservatives are now divided as they face the prospect of a regime change in Egypt driven by popular internal forces out of America’s control.
As Washington’s foremost champions of pushing to overturn Middle East dictatorships, monarchies and autocracies, these advocates, including former officials of the Bush administration, hail the revolutionary calls for democracy echoing out of Cairo as a belated vindication of their ideology. But the specter of anti-Western and anti-Israeli Islamist groups surging in to fill the political vacuum is giving some of them pause.
Note that this dilemma comes up often in foreign policy: having to choose between principles that make sense conceptually and a reality that doesn’t fit in the original (idealized) vision. Choices in those situations are difficult with almost immediate consequences. MORE:
“The U.S. should make clear in an unambiguous way that a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt is a danger to American interests and could even lead to American intervention,” David Wurmser, an adviser on the Middle East to vice president Dick Cheney, told the Forward. The Brotherhood is a well-organized and long-suppressed Islamist opposition group in Egypt and is now part of the broad coalition calling for a democratic revolution there.
Wurmser described the recent events in Egypt as a “bittersweet moment,” for those who share his worldview. “Bitter” because he fears the final outcome of a revolution, and “sweet” because the popular uprising proved that “what motivated the Arab street is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the awful governance in their own countries.”
But some supporters of the democracy-first approach believe that the rise of extremism in Egypt could be inevitable and must be accepted. “There’s a price one has to pay for embracing a dictatorship,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Gerecht, a former CIA specialist, said that another inevitable consequence of the uprising in Egypt could be a drive to chill relations with Israel. “We will see a significant change, and it will be rough,” he said. “Israel will have to adjust, and we will all need to cross our fingers and hope that the interest of democracies to avoid wars will be resilient.”
There’s a lot more so go to the link and read it in its entirety.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.