The USA Ought to Avoid Meddling

[unhappycamper]

The USA Ought to Avoid Meddling
Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden
Translated By Grace Olaison
2 February 2011
Edited by Mark DeLucas

The temptation to demand more active American support for the opposition to Mubarak in Egypt is legitimate, but something that the U.S. ought to resist. The revolutions in Tunisia and now in Egypt are popular revolutions, which have begun without American intervention, and on this road they must continue.

Those who would see more active American support to the opposition against Mubarak ought to ask themselves a question: Who would benefit? The U.S. has nothing to gain from taking a more active role in the events, and the last person the people who are revolting in Egypt want to listen to is an American president.

The West is facing a new situation. We are faced with popular revolutions that have no explicit leaders. In Tunisia, the people showed that they could — in less than a month, through demonstrations and without support from the West — oust a regime with an enormous security apparatus. The first subsequent demonstrations in Egypt therefore had the following slogan: “Tunisia is not better than Egypt.”

~snip~

But the USA’s support of Arab-world dictators has also engendered feelings of tremendous rage. Money has been used for enlarging police forces and security apparatus, two institutions hated by the people. The loathing directed toward American support for these regimes has been so extensive that even a person like Saddam Hussein, who played the anti-American card, was honored in the Arab world. In the summer of 2003, I traveled as a tourist to Tunisia, and many Tunisians reacted strongly when they heard that I was from Iraq. “You are from Saddam’s land! It’s like a bad dream that his regime has fallen. We love Saddam!”

The USA’s attempt to distance itself from Middle Eastern dictators and actively, through the so-called domino effect, democratize the region with the overthrow of Saddam has both stimulated and impeded the democratization of the region. Dictators realized that they must initiate reform in their countries and that they could no longer blame the misery in their nations on the West. A wave of reports and independent investigations into the Arabic nations’ difficult economic and political conditions were published and became accessible to the public. However, at the same time, advocates of democracy in the region have been associated with George W. Bush, the bloody war in Iraq and the occupation.

[RandomThoughts]

1. The USA spends billions on war

supports dictators then wonders why any countries are upset?

I think some people been asleep.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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