Hosni Mubarak has announced that he is stepping down. Pause for a minute to appreciate what this means: through a largely peaceful process, a one-party, one-man autocracy of immense and largely illegitimate power has been toppled by the people it ruled. That is extraordinary, and it can only be considered a great humanitarian and political success. Fears that what replaces the old system will not be democracy as America defines it may be well-founded, but I don't find them compelling. As I wrote yesterday, America was hardly a democracy as we know it for its first century-and-a-half at least, and was riven by immense political and religious divides much as Egypt is now. The situation there isn't perfect. But it's a sight better than what it was a week ago.
It's now becoming clear that the Obama administration pushed for this outcome. The New York Times reports that envoy Frank Wisner, at the White House's request, spent the weekend first gently pressing Mubarak to admit that his time was finished, then making that admission inevitable by signaling that he'd lose our support if he refused to leave. It's also evident that the White House waited until Mubarak made his intention to leave clear to the Egyptian people before it announced its own role in the process. All of this is very shrewd diplomacy: it gives the Egyptian people credit for the victory they earned, gives them the public defeat of Mubarak they wanted, and makes us look like their willing partners for the future. Well done.
I want, however, to resist the urge to deify Obama as the new face of American democratic outreach. What he did was not essentially different from what any of his predecessors did in similar situations: he analyzed the evidence, decided the course that best suited the country's needs, and pursued it. In another situation, he may well not. Obama fans, keep your radars tuned.
However. However...
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/president-mubarak-speech-5155798?src=rss
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