The question is superfluous for anyone familiar with the principles lying at the foundations of our foreign policy.
Actually, ‘lying’ is the right word for it.
For these principles presuppose a mendacious answer to the question in the title, which American and our neocons are quick to provide: Egyptians, along with the rest of the Middle East, want to be like us.
Do they really? Are they really craving all those things we’re so proud of? To wit:
– Women walking around with their secondary sex characteristics barely if at all covered
– Drunks adorning pavements in even good neighbourhoods with puke
– Men marrying each other because their women are already married, also to each other
– Gay Day parades
– Facial metal, tattoos and other body art
– Borders open to anyone wishing to get in – numbers no object
– Religion vulgarised, secularised and marginalised
– Propaganda of every known perversion to school children
– Hospitals that kill, not treat
– Schools that dumb-down, not educate
– Economy going to the dogs
– Currency rapidly becoming worthless
– People’s savings reduced to dust
– Spivs like Dave, Nick and Ed running (ruining? – amazing how much difference one letter can make) people’s lives
No, perhaps not. What the Muslims really yearn for is DEMOCRACY.
And specifically? Well, that’s a tough one. Let me think…
Why, those Egyptians and other Middle Easterners want to vote freely for politicians who are guaranteed to deliver every item on the above list.
That’s what our democracy has come to mean this side of sloganeering. And we’re told Egyptians want to be just like us.
That’s why they’re out in the streets, shooting and being shot at, killing and being killed, raping and being raped. All that because they want DEMOCRACY.
To satisfy that putative craving American and British boys have been killing and dying in huge numbers for over a decade. No sacrifice too great for the noble cause of bringing DEMOCRACY to the Middle East.
Now, it’s reasonably clear to anyone with an IQ higher than today’s scorching temperature that no such craving exists – nor can exist. So all that slaughter must satisfy a craving that’s quite different.
It does. It satisfies the bellicose instincts of the neo-Trotskyites who formulate foreign policy on either side of the Atlantic.
It also satisfies the pragmatic instincts of the neo-Machiavellians who are familiar with the time-honoured tradition of using foreign wars to distract attention from domestic problems.
The bigger the problems, the bigger the wars, so we must be grateful that we’re merely in recession. If we had a depression, like back in the 1930s, the spirit of the Blitz would have to be revived.
It’s pointless to criticise any policies put forth by the Baracks and Daves of this world – or their predecessors and followers.
It’s useless telling them it’s wrong to kill people for ideological and political reasons, especially those as ill-advised and immoral as theirs.
It’s no good suggesting to them that instead of provoking or actually perpetrating violence abroad they ought to redirect their energy to improving life at home.
That’s like telling a dog not to chase a cat around the house. Fido doesn’t do so because he thinks it’s a good idea. He does it because that’s what a dog does.
An exercise that might be useful is telling everyone we know that democracy, especially its export version, has become nothing but a neocon trick.
Any attempt to shove it down Muslim throats is bound to create the kind of reflux that can engulf the whole region, and possibly the world. Agitating for yet another Arab Spring, we can get a nuclear winter instead.
Perhaps it’s us who should be out demonstrating in the streets, not the Egyptians. Can’t you just see it?
Conservatively dressed crowds marching down Whitehall and Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting in proper accents, “Leave the world alone!”, “Mind your own business!”, “Give us our country back!”, “How about some democratic choice at home?”
Many things would have to happen for something like that to be possible. Too many for us to hold our breath.
Too many people would have to see that the choice between Dave and Ed, or Barack and whomever, is no choice at all. That our whole political class, regardless of party affiliation, is so profoundly corrupt that only surgery, not therapy, could possibly work.
So perhaps we should indeed encourage them to carry on as they are. It’s just possible that our only hope can come from the purifying effect of a major conflict. You know, of the kind our leaders are so assiduously trying to provoke.
I doubt Egyptians want that. But maybe we do.