Our Man In Cairo

Speaking of the contest between craven realists and straight-shootin' idealists, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl plumps for Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian professor who spent some time in jail for advocating pro-democracy "road maps" for all the Arab countries:

Ibrahim has friends in Washington -- the Bush administration froze a supplemental aid package for Egypt until he was released from prison earlier this year. (He was originally arrested in June 2000, shortly after he published a sarcastic critique of the possibility that Egypt's autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak, would seek to install his son Gamal as his successor.) But many people, in Washington as well as in Egypt, dismiss Ibrahim as irrelevant. "He knows how to play to a Western audience," a former State Department policymaker recently told me. "But he doesn't represent anyone in Egypt."

Maybe such assessments are accurate. But what's striking about them is how they echo, almost exactly, what I used to hear about Soviet Bloc thinkers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik, who also preached that the combination of independent civic movements and international pressure could transform their region. The establishment intelligentsia in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union -- the "liberals" who frequented Western diplomatic receptions -- disdained the dissidents. What the United States should aim at, they insisted, was not democracy but "peace" between East and West; the idea that the Communist system could be overcome simply was unrealistic.

My bullshit detector goes off whenever somebody compares the downfall of communism to the downfall of whatever ism it is (I've heard of at least a dozen) that plagues the Middle East. But anybody who spent two years in the clink for supporting peace and freedom deserves as much praise as they can give him.

Comments

[tim]

"Good sarcasm is more powerful than most non-autocrats imagine, which is why it's important to support this guy."

Agreed. I remember reading some perfum'd note by anti-irony has-been Jedediah Purdy, where he kept praising Vaclav Havel as this model of commitment and sincerity, and thinking "What about Frank Zappa? Havel was the world's most famous Zappa fan, and not one word about him!"

[James M. Ray]

Good sarcasm is more powerful than most non-autocrats imagine, which is why it's important to support this guy. Sarcasm also tends to indicate a propensity for (or at least a tolerance-of) libertarianism in the sarcastic person's political outlook, in my experience.

Also, whether or not it's an "ism," SOMETHING clearly "plagues the middle east" as you put it. I suggest it's fanatical fundamentalist-Islam's propensity for intolerance of free speech combined with widespread Nazi-style gun-control. Back when Islam was more tolerant and allowed debate and ordinary citizens could have weapons for self-defense, Islam was a MUCH more-powerful religion. Now, their fanatics may be able to destroy a WTC, but there's NO F---in' WAY that their architects could ever even hope to build a similar one in Saudi Arabia this decade -- despite all the oil wealth. That says something, doesn't it?
JMR