The problem with dissing your predecessor and calling it a matter of principle will backfire if you are Obama and there are people out here like me and Hitch. It turns out that Hitchens has identified the name of the type of dissident all Americans should soon get to know.
The best of the Egyptian “civil society” dissidents, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, produced the extraordinary effect that he did by the simple method of challenging the Mubarak regime on those very terms. If it was going to pretend to hold elections, then Ibrahim and his fellow researchers claimed the right to conduct independent surveys of the voters and to publish the results. One can hardly imagine a milder form of resistance, yet, because of the overweening stupidity and crudity of the authorities, it had consequences of an almost seismic kind. Show trials of mild-mannered opinion pollsters and think-tank scholars; dark accusations of secret foreign funding for the practice of political sociology: The whole lumbering apparatus of the Egyptian state conspired to make itself appear humourless and thuggish and to convince its people that they were being held as serfs by fools. Again, the sense of insult ran very deep, and Mubarak’s bullies were too dense to understand their own mistake.
So I'm the pesky blogger who never liked Obama's geopolitics and am determined to prove that he is inferior in that regard to GWBush. It hasn't been very difficult to prove despite the denial of those opposed to my geopolitical neoconservatism. Ibrahim, and of course Egypt, were nowhere near the President's agenda for the region. So is it any wonder Ibrahim found a willing ear in the WSJ where he said in August of 2009:
Mubarak has continued to get a free pass from the U.S. and has even received outright praise from senior members of the Obama administration. The tiny fraction of U.S. aid that is earmarked for Egypt's civil society is subject to the Mubarak regime's veto.
Egypt could be a pivotal player in regional politics. Instead, Mr. Mubarak has squandered his country's potential in exchange for control over the Egyptian people. Schemes to pass down power to his son, Gamal, are now out in the open.
The most disheartening part in all of this is that Washington under President Obama is conducting old-style foreign policy with Arab tyrants from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi to Syria's Bashar Assad. Except for his optimistic rhetoric, Mr. Obama is increasingly perceived by Arabs and Muslims as yet another American president interested in maintaining the status quo.
After his eloquent and moving talk in Cairo, many wonder whether Mr. Obama will walk the walk as forcefully as he talks the talk. He has the chance to do so today at the White House
Those in the Middle East who once lamented President George W. Bush's hasty retreat from his 2004-06 Freedom Agenda are now lamenting Mr. Obama's two month old promise to support democracy and rule of law.
Will we hear again from Saad Ibrahim or will the Obama administration try to dismiss him? Consider for a moment all the time this Administration and its political supporters spent trying to heave Imam Abdu Rauf and his rec center down the throats of the American people. Now ask yourself when it came to a real measure of freedom for Muslims why we didn't know Saad Eddin Ibrahim. I say Ibrahim is the sort of Muslim Americans should notice.
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