When a great mass of people come together into the streets, uniting across many differences and cultural boundaries to express themselves with a clear message, the very least we can do is watch, listen to their stories, hear their cries of corruption. So let's look at Egypt, so often overlooked in such a consistently troubled region, despite it's border with Palestine, Israel, Sudan, and Libya it's so rarely in the headlines. The average American knows just a few basic facts about pyramids, pharaohs, the Sahara desert and the Nile delta, we know more about it's ancient political system than it's current politics. It's one of those countries (the vast majority) that Americans know little of until they bomb it to kingdom come. And perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it's had the same leader/dictator for three decades, political stagnation, not much to see.
The phrase "life under Saddam" became redundant in the Bush years, and we were all led to believe that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and life was pretty much hell for the people of Iraq. Life is now pretty much Hell for the people of Iraq and it's hard not to look back to "life under saddam" and notice how, at least relatively, life was somewhat better. So how does "life under Mubarak" compare to Saddams' Iraq? We heard a lot about the torture Saddams forces would dole out and the "rape rooms" that as far as I can recall were never found, and I assume that's where the WMDs were hiding. Torture was prevalent under Saddam but so it was under Mubarak as well, and when we wanted to outsource torture it was good to have a friend with experience. If only Saddam had offered his morbid services to the US we could have done business and been allies like our good friend Mubarak.
But not only has the US been a strong ally of the Mubarak regime, Egypt is the second largest recipient of US military aid after Israel. And Israel is another thing Saddam and Mubarak had in common, though Saddam held fast to the popular Arab sentiment of solidarity with Palestinians and their plight under Israels' aggressive expansionism. Israel and Iraq don't share a border but they can easily lob missiles over Syria and Jordan and of course they did during the first Bushs' war with Saddam. We did fund and arm Saddam back when he was fighting the Iranians, whom we were also funding and arming, but that was a long time ago and we haven't spoken much since then. So Saddam remained a potential threat to Israel while Mubarak and his family were growing fat off of their friends in Washington DC, the latest reports show his family is worth 70 Billion dollars while the people of Egypt live in squaller.
Of course the majority of the aid that we "give" to nations like Egypt must be spent with US corporations in the military industrial complex so it's just another way to funnel tax dollars into the war machine. In a way this is the worst face of the American war machine, making war our biggest export, encouraging the acquisition and use of ever more powerful weaponry the same way a car salesman would encourage you to go for a Sunday drive. And of course on the domestic front we also export police suppression, torture, kidnapping, and other horrible acts by people in positions of power protected from prosecution. Though Saddams' corruption became quickly untenable for George W. Bush, Mubarak was totally cool with him, I guess he was a good dictator. As long as we could buy an ally for Israel we could care less just how evil that particular dictator happened to be.
Barack Obama is not Bush and he is not Mubarak, but despite his inspiring speech to the Egyptian people and the Arab world he carefully worked behind the scenes to maintain the status quo in Egypt against the will of it's people. Now Mubarak is gone (as of this writing) and the state department will be working overtime to make sure that the next leader of Egypt is equally friendly, or equally greedy. It is one thing to support a dictatorship and work closely with that regime to commit crimes against humanity as in the secret renditions, but the Obama administration is actively working against democracy, to prevent it, and/or weaken it. They're working over-overtime because they are doing the very same thing in Haiti at the same time as the democratically elected president Aristide is finally being issued a passport to return to his own country after our government (along with the governments of Canada and France) removed him from his home and country at gun point.
So what will happen now? Could the spark of revolution spread across the Arab world? Or the entire world? Could the people of Saudi Arabia take to the streets demanding a democratically elected government? What about the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine, don't they deserve to rule the country they won in a fair election? You may say they are a terrorist group but state terrorism is a part of the blueprint of power, in a way it merely proves they have what it takes to rule. And the bigger question is... Can it happen here? It will happen here, but what will it take? This is the headquarters of global hegemony, it's hard to say how a real American revolution might look but it can't look much different than what we've been watching in Egypt. Remember, there never has been an American revolution because there was no nation called "America" before 1776, and what we call the American revolution has given us an aristocratic model of democracy in which the wealthy have an overwhelming advantage.
We the people of the world can unite, we can overcome the tyrannies of the institutions of power.
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