Now we arrive in the Middle East as smiling supplicants, blessing any “people’s change” (unless it is any monarchical autocracy of the Gulf)

...

Middle East and NA

But never before has America joined in our European submission. Take the Obama policy, constructed on the colossal wreck of Bush’s New American Century. Barack Obama held out his hand to Iran. They bit his hand. He supported Mubarak. Then he no longer supported Mubarak. He supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt after he won the elections. And he – and the repulsive Tony Blair – now support the Egyptian army. Blair was bad enough. Egypt was in danger of “sliding into total chaos”, he has now told us, and we have to help the country “go back [sic] to democracy” after the “virtually unique situation” in which “either the army intervened or the country collapsed”.

But now listen to William Burns, the US Under-Secretary of State and allegedly the most powerful diplomat in America – and thus the world – as he arrived in Cairo last week. “I did not come with American solutions, nor did I come to lecture anyone. We will not try to impose our model on Egypt.” Just what that “model” is was a mystery to Egyptians, but Burns’ inevitable visit to the lads in khaki who staged the latest coup suggests that, once again, Washington prefers generals to democrats in hot places.

read more >>