...The political class and military officers have concluded that Mubarak is a liability, but perhaps more significantly they have concluded that the advice coming from Washington is insanity that must be resisted. They need look no further than yesterday's declaration by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that the Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular" and has "eschewed violence." With the likes of Clapper making decisions in Washington, the responsible people in Cairo know that they are on their own.
...The Egyptian Army is a neo-Kemalist institution, well aware that its Turkish counterpart--once powerful and even constitutionally unassailable--has been neutered by democratically elected hard-line Islamists, to the thundering applause of an enfeebled and degenerate West. It will not allow the same thing in Cairo. There will be peace on the Nile, or else there will be blood, but there will be no "democracy" of the kind that serves the ends of those who want to use it as a tool of instituting Sharia.
..."Democracy" is not feasible outside of the framework of ideas that sustain it. These ideas, in the case of the West, are rooted back into the history of the polis of Greece, the Scriptures, the heresy of the Enlightenment, the notion of liberty, of individual responsibility resulting from the existence of individual free will, of collective creativity embodied in the rendering of classical symphonies and the launching of space missions.
The money quote
When we see the first Egyptian space shuttle return safely to base, we'll know that the Army may well risk a genuinely free election. |