Whack-a-Democracy

The Arab Spring, the Tahrir Square, the entire works boiled down to a choice between a military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those of us who actually understood the region warned that this would happen, warned people not to listen to the Arab Springers or the Twitter activists and not to agonize over the latest riot casualties. We said the Neo-conservatives were wrong. We said the democracy promoters were full of hot air. We said that anyone claiming that the United States could not hold back "democratic change" was an idiot without a clue about the region. Now it looks like the whole glorious circus is about to end with a limited military dictatorship pushing the reset button back to where it was before, but without Mubarak. And that's a best case scenario.

It means that things are still worse than they were before. The economic liberalization that Mubarak's son might have carried out is gone. The Muslim Brotherhood has gained a lot of momentum. Any hope of political reforms has been foreclosed, because Egypt is now stuck between its military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Anyone who advocates reform is choosing the Brotherhood. The one thing we should take away from this, is that the entire history of the last two years, every news article, from the glowing celebrations of the people's revolution to the rise of the Brotherhood to the dissolution of the new reforms, should be printed up, rolled up into a newspaper and used to whack anyone who calls for "democratic change" in Egypt, or any relatively stable Muslim country that isn't openly at war with us, across the nose. Hard. Keep whacking them across the nose until they reread the entire history of their disaster and learn something from it. Oh, and Syria, all the people telling you that intervening to overthrow Assad and replace him with the Muslim Brotherhood would be a terrible idea... they're right too. But why listen to us, when you can listen to Thomas Friedman and John McCain ?

“There’s always, ‘We don’t know who they are.’ I’ll tell you who they are. They’re a direct repudiation of Al Qaeda,” McCain said three weeks ago. “Al Qaeda believes in acts of terror to change governments. These people believe in peaceful demonstration.”

Sure, go with it. What's the worst that could happen? I don't want to bash the people on my side. I don't want to get into article wars or blog wars with them because it's unproductive, but the people pushing for arming the Syrian Jihadists are being wildly irresponsible. And they're pushing Romney into siding with their disastrous policy. There is absolutely no political profit in hitting Obama from the neo-conservative side on Syria. The American people don't want another war and when Obama does something on Syria, they will only look like idiots for complaining that he wasn't doing anything. There is no choice between a secular moderate national regime and a dictatorship. There is a choice between a dictatorship and Islamists. Choose one or the other, but don't pretend that there's a third option on the table. Not unless you can show us where that option has taken root. Syria is not our war. There is nothing to gain from it. ...one of the few mainstream conservative commentators who gets it; is Andy McCarthy who has been pressing this issue over and over again warning against misguided intervention on behalf of rebel Jihadists.

Daniel Greenfield——Bio and Archives Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.