Tuesday, February 1, 2011

DEMOCRACY CAN TURN AROUND AN BITE YOU IN THE ....

          This post is going to be short, sweet and to the point, not researched, off the cuff, by the seat of my pants, shooting from the hip, blind justice, on the fly, off the top of my head, at the drop of a hat, without beating around the bush and full of clichés.
          Beware of what you wish for, especially in Cairo, North Africa, the Middle and the Far East. Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t. Because if you do: You will be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
          Any change in Egypt will put the United States between a rock and a hard place. For years we have advocated the spread of democracy in the most unlikely of places. We publicly declare that “Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destructions. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect for the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terrorism. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer –so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.” George W. Bush, State of The Union Speech, 2006. What self serving crap, and a flagrant lie to boot.
          All this while we were supporting President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign of terror to the tune of $1.3 billion a year in military aid to what has now been proven to be a failed dictatorship. That is in addition to billions of aid to failed states, Iraq and Afghanistan included, and $349 million to Tunisia’s deposed former President Ben Ali, now basking in the sun in Saudi Arabia. Would that the United States and Presidents Bush and Obama put their mouths were our money was being wasted.
          But even if they had put their money where their mouths were, the democracy they want is only democracy that we favor. They forget, and don’t want us to know, that in the 2005 Egyptian elections 88 seats, or 20% of the 444 parliamentary seats were won by the Muslim Brotherhood. In the January 2006 Palestinian Parliamentary Elections Hamas, the political wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, won 56% of the parliamentary seats.
          If you truly support democracy in its rawest form, be prepared to have that democracy, one that we may well not like and that may well hate us, come back and bite us in the ass.

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