The risks of the status quo are always safer and more appealling than the uncertainties of the new, the unfamiliar and the unpredictable. So it wasn’t a great surprise to discover Vice-President Joe Biden saying last night that, all things considered, he wouldn’t refer to Hosni Mubarak “as a dictator” or outgoing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisting that Washington has no interest in “taking sides” in the struggle between the sclerotic Egyptian regime and the protestors. Depressing, perhaps, but not surprising.
Like everyone else, the White House is waiting to see what happens today. Everyone agress that Mubarak’s regime is rotten and that the 82-year old dictator (sorry, Mr Biden) cannot endure forever. Everyone also knows that Washington needs the assistance of whoever runs Egypt (whenever and however that transition comes). So, galling as it to see the Americans tacitly side with the regime, the logic of their position is clear. Sit tight and wait and see.
But there is a time and a season for everything. And maybe, just maybe, this is Egypt’s moment. How long, in any case, can the status quo endure? Perhaps the alternatives really are “worse” (for western interests and, perhaps, for Egypt too) but change cannot be denied forever. At some point the walls crack and fall. They will not stand forever. Failed regimes end.
The hypocrisy of the Augustinian approach to change in the Arab world – yes please, but not just yet – cannot last forever either. At some point the people themselves will seize the moment and we’ll only be charged with living with the consequences. Perhaps it won’t happen today or this month or even this year but eventually it will.
It seems extremely unlikely that every “reform” movement will produce results that please the west, especially initially. But the fear of something worse only takes one so far. The Telegraph editorialises that “The West needs to be on its guard that, by supporting the cause of Arab democracy, it does not unwittingly unleash the forces of radical Islam.” Well, yes. So does the Telegraph believe that, in the long-term, Arab democracy is impossible? Does it actually think that the west has been supporting democracy in the Arab world? (Apart from a brief, but even then ambivalent, flurry when Condi Rice was Secretary of State.) Or is it still too risky? If so, then for how much longer must it, and the people, be suppressed?
In the end this caution, perfectly reasonable as it is, risks empowering the very forces it is most afraid of. A gradual transition to new arrangments might well be in everyone’s best interests in Egypt and beyond but the stupidity and venality and cruelty of these regimes may make that most unlikely. If that’s the case then for reasons that are distasteful but understandable, Washington and its allies will have helped exacerbate the problem again. And that may not be forgotten either.
Sons of bitches remain sons of bitches even when they’re notionally your sons of bitches. In the end there’s a limit to how long you can support or tolerate them. Eventually the clock runs out on realpolitik. We may not be at that moment yet (there’ve been false dawns before) but some day we’ll reach it. God knows what the consequences will be and some of them are likely to be pretty grim. But that’s what happens when you’re working with crooked timber.
Maybe Mubarak will survive. But he, like others in the wider region, has been put on notice. Whatever the risks and wherever the chips may fall it’s hard not to think this a welcome and overdue development. Perhaps it’s time.
UPDATE: The news that the Egyptian regime has apparently tried to shut down the internet is not, obviously, encouraging. But it’s also a sign of their desperation. Perhaps it will work this time but even if it does there will be a next time too.
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