Mubarak's Sham Continues

Fire of Liberty

Max Boot has written another gem of a column in Thursday's edition of The Los Angeles Times on the duplicitous nature of Hosni Mubarak and his gaggle of friends in Egypt. As America continues to shell out some $2 billion in military/economic aid to the Egyptian government to ensure peace, Mubarak makes a mockery of this nation and our call for democratic reforms. Though Mubarak offers mere platitudes of change by announcing the upcoming presidential election is opened to other parties and candidates as long as they meet the narrowly tailored qualifications of Mubarak's parliament. Just look at what Boot has to say about the sham reforms of Mr. Mubarak:

There is little hope that Mubarak will give opposition candidates equal access to state-owned TV stations and newspapers, which regularly extol his virtues with embarrassing exaggeration. Nor can he be trusted to hold a fair vote. A group representing Egyptian judges has refused to supervise the balloting because, as one judge put it, they "won't participate in fraud." Even Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief, on a charm tour of the United States this week, has to admit that Egypt won't see a truly contested election until 2011 at the earliest.

Nazief justifies this go-slow approach with soothing talk about how "democracy is an evolutionary process," and you can't go too fast lest Islamic extremists take control. But that's what the shah of Iran said in the 1970s. It turned out that his opposition to democratic reform made an Islamist takeover more, not less, likely. Same with Egypt: The less access that fed-up people have to the political process, the more likely they are to be seduced by the hard-line mullahs' siren song.

It's amazing that we continue to shell out such sums of money to this dictatorial regime and gladly look the other way because Mubarak and the people from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department continue to argue that this loss of funds and reform will bring about the emergence of Islamic fundamentalists. We can continue this Cold War/Realist game with Egypt or we can push the Bush doctrine of promoting Democracy in the Middle East. Remember, there were similar voices of Islamists taking over in the run-up to the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as you know these parties either failed to garner any votes or enough to make a significance in the government. So maybe it's time to trust the people of Egypt rather than a man who has been running Egypt some 25 years. It's time to see.