Tuesday, February 01, 2011

A question

So... listening to the latest incremental back-down from power by Hosni Mubarek (I'm sure even he sees the writing on the wall), a question comes to mind.

IF -- IF we actually stay out of the Egyptian uprising and they have a free and fair election, with their own candidates who took it upon themselves to run for office....

...will this be the first time we have NOT stepped in during a power-vacuum situation to put in our own little puppet dictator? (See, oh I don't know, maybe Hussein, Saddam; Karzai, Hamed; Noriega, Manuel; Pinochet, Augusto....)

Will President Obama be able to resist the temptation? Will he continue to just stand aside and use words, not military/black-ops interference to (ahem) "influence" the outcome of any Egyptian elections? Will the Egyptians get the revolution they want?

4 comments:

Dr. Monkey Hussein Monkerstein said...

We kind of stayed out of the way in Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Our record in the Middle East is much more murky. However I have no doubt that Obama will do the thing that most pisses off his base in this situation.

Abu Scooter said...

Maybe Obama won't do anything else. In the first place, things are moving too fast. Beyond that, doing nothing would be a great way to piss off the Likud boys in Tel Aviv and, not incidentally, their Dominionist and Zionist supporters here in the States. We can hope, I suppose.

dguzman said...

Dr. Monkey--we never care about "old Europe" as Darth Cheney called it, but when it's Central or South America, the Middle East, or Asia, the Empire kicks in and fucks things up.

Abu Scooter--I can only hope you're right, that things are moving so fast that we don't have time to step in and fuck things up. I know the reich-wingers are sounding the alarm because, god forbid, "we don't know what's going to happen! it could impact 'stability!'" The all-powerful all vague "stability" card, played whenever some country doesn't kiss our ass and let us roll over them.

gmb said...

I don't see the US standing back. We give then $1.5 billion in military aid--which really is welfare for Lockheed, Boeing, et al. Will that stop? And Israel is unlikely to like it for the US to "get out of the way." There are too many monied interests involved for the government to stay out of it. That said, maybe the people there won't give us a choice. Hope so for their sake.